Adwords issue -- charging me for more than total traffic

Yikes - what do I need to put together to challenge this

[stuartmcdonald]

I built a couple of simple sites a couple of months ago and set up a couple of adwords campaigns to promote them. Foolish me I totally forgot about them until I saw my latest credit card bill and had a freak-out - checked the adwords account and have burned through over $500 in about 6 weeks -- ouch.

The problem is (aside from my forgetfulness) is that Google has billed be for more traffic than went to the site in total!

In the month of September they're billed me for 382 clicks but the entire traffic to the site was (via awstats):

Uniques: 238
Number of visits: 292
Number of pageviews: 326

So even if every single visitor came via an Adwords listing (it didn't as there's traffic from SERPS and interlinked sites included in the totals), they've billed me for too much traffic.

Can anyone who has been through this advise what I need to put together to send to Google to query both the traffic and the charge?

Tks

[edited by: stuartmcdonald at 9:55 am (utc) on Oct. 3, 2006]

[trannack]

Are you actually seeing the number of clicks on the Adwords campaign main page? If so, it is possible you have set up an advert whereby you have mis-typed the domain name, therefore they will have no where to land. I have not heard of anyone having bills for non-existant clicks via Adwords, perhaps someone else had. Normally when I have experienced this, it is because I have made a small typo error in my landing page url. Did you not have a budget set up on the account? Expensive learning curve. You have my sympathy. Ionce entered £35 a click instead of 0.35p - very expensive mistake that i have never done since!

[stuartmcdonald]

Hi,

No typos -- there's only two adverts and they're both correct.

Expensive learning curve indeed...

[trannack]

But is the total number of clicks you are viewing on the summary page the same as your bill - or is your bill for more clicks than are showing on the summary page?

[ronmcd]

Could it be your sites (or host) were down at some point, or were slow loading?

[stuartmcdonald]

Ok a bit more detail:

There's two sites, both running off the same Adwords account, but with seperate domain names. Each has one advert in Adwords.

All stats are for September 2006 from awstats:

Site 1
Uniques: 238
Number of visits: 292
Number of pageviews: 326

Site 2
Uniques: 123
Number of visits: 125
Number of pageviews: 141

The Adwords reports for September say:
Site 1
322 clicks
Site 2
60 clicks
For a total of 382 clicks.

So the click to traffic ratio is credible for site 2, but site 1 looks off way-off, particularly once other traffic from SERPS and inter-site linkages is taken into account.

The billing for advertising costs from 1-30 September is for 382 clicks. So they match.

[stuartmcdonald]

Ronmcd, highly unlikely -- they're simple, one page sites, load in a snap.

They're both on the same server as my main site, that I'm working on pretty much all the time, so if there was down time I think I'd have known about it...

[eWhisper]

To answer this question, you first need to understand how web stats function.

I suggest you read the two below threads to get more of an idea on how stat programs and caching works.

Understanding Caching:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Java vs log files tracking: [webmasterworld.com...]