Adwords wasted clicks

Can competitors keep clicking?

[currington]

Can competitors keep clicking your adwords advert to keep costing you money and inturn cause your advert to drop off?

[chiyo]

Google adwords say they have procedures in place to guard against fraudulant clicks, and if you suspect it you can email them.

If they keep on clicking on your own ad, you want fall off, but just keep on going up!

[currington]

Thanks chiyo

Now my add keeps disapearing, if I refresh the page sometimes it comes back sometimes is goes again.

Any Ideas?

[Mike_Mackin]

Any Ideas?

It may relate to your daily limit setting.

If the ad will cost $100 per day and you set your limit at $50 the ad will only show 50% of the time throughout the day.

[currington]

Thanks Mike

I have now found that is the reason.
Thanks for your help.

[vibgyor79]

One good way of finding out whether you've been a victim of click fraud is keeping an eye on your CTR. If you notice unusually high CTR for certain keywords, you should watch out for trouble.

[cabman]

If someone was repeatedly clicking away, wouldn't that show up on visitor logs as a repeat visitor, or does adwords display it's own cached version?

We seem to get more clicks than show up in logs, although this is just a feeling rather than actual counting.

[WindSun]

The silly thing is for people that do that, is that they are actually helping you (if you can stand the temporary hits), as it effectively raises the "PR" (for lack of a better word) of your ad, which makes it show up higher.

[TheDave]

From my experiments with my own adwords it would seem that they have in fact put some protection in place. Multiple clicks on my add from the same machine resulted in only 1 additional click on the adwords stats.

[daroz]

I spent about $6 on a made-up keyword and spent some time doing an analysis of the spam-checking algo Google uses a few months ago.

(To say that I'm not going to discuss anything remotely like a 'detail' is an understatment.)

If you are interested you'll need access to about 5 machines and some scripting knowledge.

The results I found provide what I'd call 'good' protection from massive clickers, but in almost all cases (except VERY close clicks) the first two clicks would be charged against you. I can see why and, for most low-CPC keywords I don't have an issue. (User visits, clicks 'back' and then the ad again results in another charge.)

The only other comment that I will make is that a determined clicker (scripted) can cost you money, but nothing anywhere near the high-cost you would think.

In Short: I'm comfortable with the level of protection, and in the event that it is not sufficient such an incident would be, for most sites, extremely obvious, and I'm sure Google would happily credit you once presented with some logs.

[currington]

Thanks guys, I am new to adwords. I started a campain this weekend dur to my poor results after the last dance (I hope that was not deliberate Google :) ) and I have seen good results.