Impression Spam has hit me, should I start a new account?

[T_Media]

The subject says it all. I noticed a huge spike in impressions of my ad on the 21st of feb with no clicks - this has significantly lowered my overall CTR and I've been knocked from number one slot.

I believe a competitor has purposely created this spike in impression just to push me down the list.

I've contacted google about the incident to see if they'll erase the impressions from my account so that my overall quality score isn't affected - but from what I've read, google is less than helpful in cases like this one.

I'm just wondering if anyone knows a way to stop impression spam... although I really doubt it.

My plan B would be to create a new adwords account and copy and paste everything over using adwords editor. This would hopefully allow me to start with a fresh quality score. What do you guys think?

[bwnbwn]

I would suspect a new account is that a new account and your starting from scratch. I would wait and allow them to do the job as the G team must have seen this themselves and can correct the issue. I as well bet they can determine the ips used to spam the account and possible trace set up to hammer the one that did it.

[T_Media]

well they've sent me an email back, but it was less than helpful.

They gave me a very generic response and suggested that it might have been a 'seasonal fluctuation'. Yeah right! 10 times the normal number of impressions and no clicks on a single day all on one exact keyphrase. Seems very unlikely for a term like "wedding photographer".

They also suggested I may just have been approved by a search partner in the google network. I'm not even freaking opted into the google search partner network.

Anyway, I've replied making it clear that it is impression spam, that nothing else could have caused it. Hopefully they'll actually pay more attention.

[ByronM]

Why not run your search terms through google trends and see if there are indeed spikes for terms.

[Zuckerman]

I wouldn't worry too much about the odd day of high impressions, as long as your click data is relatively consistent (as long as we're talking CPC search & not CPM site targeting etc).

I've seen one or two instances of this over the past few months, but it generally has no visible impact on history or results/conversions etc

[T_Media]

Thanks for all your comments - google still didn't do anything to really help out, but fortunately the impression spam has stopped now so CTR is slowly fighting its way back to the original level and its seems I've regained slot 1 again.

Thanks for the google trends suggestion, but unfortunately there wasn't enough search volume for it to display any data.