AOL user DRAINING my adword account help!

AOL click fraud multiple ip address's

[wootoot99]

I have studied my logs see that for the last 2 weeks, aol ip addresses have been clicking away at my ads and only staying on my site for a fraction of a second. My campaign costs have quadrupled up over the last 2 weeks with no increase in orders.

From what I am gathering, if a user is on AOL and has cookies(and flash cookies) disabled, I more or less have no way of isolating the thief and no recourse.

I need the aol ads to keep running through google adwords since 1/3 of our sales come from legit aol buyers, but am at my breaking point. As far as AOL goes, I cant block the ip's or else I will block most all aol users. Everytime an aol user logs on, they get a new set of SHARED ip's. Millions of users all sharing a set of ip's. If I block the ones that hit me today, i'll efectively block tens of thousands of users and i need aol buyers since they make up a decent portion of my sales.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

Thank you

[poster_boy]

Hello wootoot99 - Welcome to WebmasterWorld...

Is this issue isolated to an identifiable subset of keywords - or, is it more widespread?

[fabfurs]

AOL users are behind a proxy server and fed cached pages of your site. Very little click fraud from AOL users (IMHO), they see your content page for the AD's link but your log files wont always show all the GETs to complete the page.

These CTs need to be part of your calculation for ROI, or adjust your ad.

[wootoot99]

thanks for the replies...
I know our patterns like the back of my hand and see the AOL click fraud Ip's hitting my page using roughly 3 keywords that are fairly costly(costly to me at $9) a pop.
I agree that there is very little click fraud from aol users but I fear that the competition has access to an aol account and is attacking me.

My historicals show no issues with AOL, however, the new patterns show a 30 fold increase of aol traffic all clicking on the same two or three terms - letting the page load, and leaving. I am afraid that danning AOL might be the only recourse unless I can learn of another technique to battle this. I need those 3 keywords to remain active so turning them off or lowering my bid will not work since I need to remin in the top 3.
I am thinking that contacting aol directly will be a waste of time.

Thanks and hope this helps with your attemp to help me,

[BDuns]

I recommend checking into whether AOL is running some sort of promotion or special...they will show your ad to people that are NOT searching. For example -

I want to avoid including anything that might disclose what industry I'm in, so let's pretend I sell sailing shoes. What I would find is thousands of clicks on our sailing shoes, because aol included them in a promotion for athletic shoes like basketball shoes and football cleats.

You can see how the two types of shoes are related, but not nearly enough to feature both types in the same promotion. And, since they put an ad on the homepage for "click here to see the latest athletic shoes" or something like that....it gets lots of clicks...if you put a link in front of someone, they'll click it.

So that's how I was able to get a refund, and get blocked from aol (don't get much from 'em anyway) - I told them we will only pay for clicks that come from someone actively searching. I will not pay for clicks that come for people YOU served my ad to, people that were not searching for my product.

I would check into that, and make sure they were serving your ads some place or to someone that they shouldn't have been.

[wootoot99]

listen...your not getting it.

I HAVE SOMEONE WITH AN AOL ACCOUNT PURPOSEFULLY CLICKING MY GOOGLE ADS!

That is what i am trying to find a solution for. Thats all.