Been charged for clicks that I cannot see received

concerned about click thru's not being accurate

[WendyTinley]

Hi and thanks in advance for reading.

On 11th February I reinstated an adword campaign and Google Adwords stats claim that 27 click thru's occurred.

On examining the servers access logs I can only see 13 click thru's that contain the specific referer=GoogleAdwordsSelect&gclid=*** information.

Below is an example with identifying info removed.

IP address - - [11/Feb/2008:12:47:34 +0000] "GET /widget.html?referer=GoogleAdwordsSelect&gclid=specific-code-removed HTTP/1.1" 200 17241 "website referrer information" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

I contacted GoogleAdwords via their contact form on the 11th with no reply - I've emailed them again today...

GoogleAdwords publish that they respond normally within one business day... what are other people's experience regarding something like this?

I want to restart the campaign but prefer to get this issue clarified first.

Thanks again for reading.

Best wishes
Wendy

[WendyTinley]

BUMP

Does anyone have any advice to offer re: this matter or any experience to share please. I'd sincerely love to hear the time it has taken for others to receive a response from Google... I feel so frustrated right now with Google.

Thank you!

[doctor gerlis]

do you have the search and content network enabled? There can be delays (and possibly spurious clicks) from this.

[WendyTinley]

doctor gerlis replied

do you have the search and content network enabled? There can be delays (and possibly spurious clicks) from this.

Only for a short while until I focused on search. My point is... how can Google charge me for 27 clicks when my access log files show only 13 referal clicks? Can it be down to caching? If we've genuinely had 27 people click through then good!

My concern also is the delay in the response to my queries from GoogleAdwords support. This is my first complaint so I have no idea what the normal experience is when sending queries/complaints to support.

I've been reading other threads and it is coming clear that my optimism of getting this sorted any time soon is misplaced. :( Meanwhile my client is wondering why I am not carrying on with the campaign... I'm just trying to pay what is due and not get my client fleeced.

[doctor gerlis]

In my experience google do eventually get round to dealing with issues, but they may regard an enquiry about 14 extra clicks as too specific for them to answer- you may or may not get a credit for these, but do not be surprised if you get no reply. I have often questioned click volumes and obtained credits without detailed explanation. You should run the campaign again and monitor it again we all get fleeced a little bit from time to time, it's the nature of the medium- if the clicks produce a return on investment then it is worth running the campaign and accepting the contradicting data. Adding some click fraud detection software may make things better, but this is not perfect either. Hope this helps.