Content Ads

[momotan]

I was doing a who's linking to me check today and i stumbled on this site that had a link to me. I said to myself "self, let's see why they are linking to me, because we have nothing in common from the URL names". Guess what I found. It speaks volumes on why content ads are ripping webmasters off. And it looks like G's click fraud system is really asleep at the wheel.

<edited>URL of forum encouraging members to click on AdSense Ads</edited>

[edited by: skibum at 5:59 am (utc) on Mar. 3, 2005]

[diamondgrl]

OK, so you found blatant click fraud. It's your job as a citizen of the World Wide Web to report it to Google's Adsense. So do it at once.

If you don't get any response, then write a thread titled "Why you shouldn't bother with Content Ads".

[diamondgrl]

Incidentally, I took the 30 seconds necessary to report it myself. So hopefully the fraud will be shut down within weeks.

If not, the system didn't work and you have reason to be concerned. If so, the system worked and we should take a small measure of comfort.

[too much information]

Kinda nice of them to keep track of dates, times and ads clicked. That will make it easier for the Google Accounting department. ;o)

[europeforvisitors]

Better not bother with search ads, either. You never know how many times a competitor may be clicking on your ads.

[FromRocky]

A good find but too late. This contest to click on AdSense ads had taken place over one and a half month ago and Google hasn't done anything about it. Happy that someone has reported it. The lists contain some of highly competitive niches, high paid ads.

[christh]

There's some really sickening stuff of this nature out there. I was witness to a website where clicks were stated to be 'paying for xyz's vacation - so get clicking!'. That's the sort of thing that makes me turn off content for many of my campaigns.

Momotan and anyone else that's discovered this going on - see if you can find a cached version of the site on G where this crap was going on. Also, the WaybackMachine is utterly killer for digging up webmasters' old adsense defrauding.

And I'm not promoting a vendetta against adsense publishers, I'm one myself -- although in a limited capacity. It's just that people cheating the system really get on my wick, particlarly when it's my money!

[beren]

hopefully the fraud will be shut down within weeks.

Yes, but only after it has cheated advertisers (who will most likely not receive refunds) and made money for the criminals. Who have received no punishment at all and have no reason not to set up a similar scheme somewhere else.

If so, the system worked and we should take a small measure of comfort.

Are advertisers supposed to rely on the vigilance of honest people reporting fraud? Because there is no telling how many of these systems are out there and unreported. Which supports the OP's point that it's dangerous to enable content ads.

Better not bother with search ads, either. You never know how many times a competitor may be clicking on your ads.

No doubt competitor clicking happens. It's sort of today's equivalent of prank phone calls by teenagers. Annoying, but not worth getting too upset about. But I can't believe competitor clicking is on the order of magnitude of AdSense fraud designed to make money for publishers. Nobody has any hard data, but I would be surprised if competitor clicking amounted to even 1% as much as AdSense fraud.

[running scared]

A good find but too late

I would be suprised if Google considers it to be too late to either kick the publisher out or refund clicks

[ukstages]

i used to be dead set against the content network and then i tried it ...and tracked conversion. for me, for some of my widgets, i get conversions 20% or more higher with content clicks than with search.

(your mileage may vary.)

like many others, i have content turned off in all my "regular" campaigns and then i have a variety of separate campaigns - with many of the same keywords - where search is turned off and content is selected.

it was hard to set up and it's a bit cumbersome to manage, but it separates them so that i can have minimum or very low bids on the content clicks.

what i really don't like with content, though, is the quality of some of the sites... there are an extraordinarily high number of content sites that have no "content" at all, except snippets of text from high ranking sites on a particular topic (including mine) very low down on the page.

this evidently attracts the traffic, but what the visitor sees when they land on the page is a collection of adsense ads. some of these sites even appear to be search partners and not content partners.

how do these faux search engines ever get approved into the adsense network?

and, perhaps more importantly, why can't we selectively exclude them, as adsense publishers can with competitive ads?

[martingale]

Is there any way to tell in your weblog whether an inbound referrer is coming from content or search or from google search?

[ukstages]

look for "googlesyndication.com" in the referral string.

you can also append the "content" designation to your own adwords URLs:

?source=adwords&kw=WidgetContent

[inasisi]

you can also append the "content" designation to your own adwords URLs:

?source=adwords&kw=WidgetContent

You can use this method only if you have a campaign with only content syndication turned on. Even then this campaign could still get clicks from google.com.

It would be really good if Google could let us know what match type and what syndication was used for the click. They could do some thing like what Overture does, append these values as parameters to our destination URL or have dynamic insertion for these also in the destination URL similar to how they allow it for keyword insertion{keyword}.

[ukstages]

yes, you're absolutely right, inasisi.

my earlier post (on page one of this thread) mentioned that i broke some campaigns down into separate content and search campaigns.

[Rhino]

if they're not separated, try this...

?source={ifsearch:s-}{ifcontent:c-}adwords&...

then...

source=s-adwords when it's search
and
source=c-adwords when it's content