Adwords editorial staff clicking on my msn ads?

[eville84]

I noticed something very intersting in my logs today.
Someone from Google headcourters clicked on an ad I have placed on the adcenter network. Now I know what your thinking, big deal. Here is where it gets interesting.

August 1st: I launch an adwords campaign to www.sitename.com/?query=keyword

August 7th: I launch the exact same campaign I launched August 1st but this time with MSN Adcenter. (exact same ad, exact same destination url)

August 9th: Google IP, **.***.**.** with user agent; [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)] enters my site from a google referer. They land on www.sitename.com/?query=keyword.

August 12th: With the same Google IP as August 9th, but a different user agent [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30] the page, www.sitename.com/?query=keyword is entered. Weird thing is that this time the referer is MSN. The url parameter &FORM=QSRE4 is added to the end of the msn referer.

This keyword does not rank on MSN. In fact the site is not even indexed by msn. The only way a user can come into my site from MSN with that keyword is from the ad i placed.

So what is going on here?
a) is msn experimenting with adwords ads on the MSN network?

or

b) is a representive of google clicking on the ad I placed with msn. If so, am i being charged for this ad? Or has google made arrangements with MSN to place the QSRE4 query string at the end of the url and therefor have the click discounted.

Either way, weird behaviour coming from the folks at google.

Anyone else seen this?

[netmeg]

MSN leaves some pretty weird stuff in my log files (see this thread: [webmasterworld.com...] I wouldn't worry about it too much; just monitor your costs. If you're running any kind of analytics, you might be able to get more info on it.

[Rehan]

Googlers are people too. They use search engines just like other people and sometimes do click on the ads because they're interested in them. And perhaps some of them use MSN sometimes, just like the general population.

If you search through your log files, you'll see &FORM=QSRE4 from other IP addresses as well (and you may also find QSRE3 and others). So it's not indicative of anything specific to Google and/or any arrangements with MSN.

[deviantlnx]

could it be msn outsourcing their editorial staff to google employees?

Rehan: i searched google and found that particular query string. And why would a google employee be searching for something on msn?

it seems suspicious to me too.

eville: do you have any more info on this?