Adwords click fraud

huge number of undetected invalid clicks

[Paulus]

In the past few months I have had just 55 visits resulting from my adwords campaigns and have paid for over 2500 clicks. This means 98% of my clicks are from the same IP address. Having spents hours searching google help I can find no way of locating the IP address responsible for these fraud clicks.
Does anyone know of any way to track the IP address?

[jackgordon]

You should investigate some clickfraud software to install on your landing pages.... this will show you more details about the IP addresses and so on. Google won't tell you this information precisely.

[Paulus]

thanks for that. I will look into some software. I am very surprised google are not tackiling this issue properly. I cannot be alone here.

[whitneyciao]

You can try to run a report to show whether google charged you for invalid clicks.

[adwords.google.com...]

[Paulus]

I have just 2 invalid clicks that google have picked up. I have contacted google and received an automated response which was of no use. 98% of the clicks I have paid for have been invalid which the google system has let through.
Short of stopping advertising I can see no answer at the moment.

[avalon37]

If I may offer some advice from personal experience. Forget about trying to request click credits from Google. In the last 3 years (years previously it was a much different case)you will not get credits. It's 100% their word/decision against you. Even if you can prove it, it doesn't matter. You will drive yourself NUTS, trust me. You either have to take the position that Google is always in the driver's seat or get into a new business. We are powerless. The only power we have is to decide NOT to advertise with Google. Trust me on this.

[Webstercat]

whitneyciao

I followed your link and read the Google Instructions but on the new version of admin (under Reports/Performance) I don't see any option of getting reports about invalid clicks. Have this feature been eliminated?

[whitneyciao]

Webstercat,

I don't currently use the new interface. You can try using the older one.

[Hissingsid]

If Google released the raw data, or in fact any data, on who was clicking your/our links this problem would soon go away or at least Google might be forced to stop charging us for multiple clicks from the same person/computer. They argue that they can't do this for data protection reasons as they would have to give us IP addresses.

It seems to me that it would be easy to allocate some form of identifier to an IP/session without actually telling us the IP and then we could see for ourselves what the average number of clicks from the same people was.

Unless Google is forced to do this I can't see them every giving in to this one though.

Cheers

Sid

[Paulus]

I agree. Google have come up with no answers or solutions. Short of stop advertising I can't see any way forward.

[Nuttakorn]

You may use PPC Auditing service which you can generate the report and discuss with sale presentative from Google. I use Whosclickingwho.com , that's good that can report how many clicks from same IP Address.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

For anyone interested in taking a deep dive into what AdWords does to prevent invalid clicks (and what you can do as well), please start here:

Invalid Clicks:
[adwords.google.com...]

And this is a useful resource as well:

Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center:
[google.com...]

AWA