Can anyone tell me if clicks that come from a country, other than the one you are accepting clicks from, are charged for?
I only want clicks from the US and have people from India and other places clicking on my ad.
This happens when an user connect from his own country using a different Google interface.
For example,if you selected to show your ads only for UK but an user connect from Netherland using Google.co.uk interface,he see your ads and his clicks are counted as if come from UK .
Are these clicks coming from AdSense, Google, or another search network (i.e. AOL)? If they're coming from google, they help out your CTR, so it's not a total loss (though you still have to pay for the clicks, of course). If they are coming from another source, you can disable them fairly easy. Non-Google search ads and content network ads won't help your rank at all, so they're totally wasted.
I'd keep track of these clicks in case you want to report them as click fraud to Google. Does the clicks seem to come from a single source (i.e. same originating IP)? If there seems to be a pattern, there's a good chance the clicks are fraudulent.
This happens when an user connect from his own country using a different Google interface.
For example,if you selected to show your ads only for UK but an user connect from Netherland using Google.co.uk interface,he see your ads and his clicks are counted as if come from UK .
This is generally true, but it makes no real sense to me. I'm in the UK, and use a UK ISP, and when I connect to Google.com specifically, I still get all the UK Adwords even though I get the US search results. However.. if I go to Google.fr, I get French ads. Why is this? Surely I should get US ads when I go to Google.com rather than UK ones, no, if this is a set policy?
with regard to "clicks" from india, though... look at your logs closely.
i, too, suspected click fraud, but apparently google has hired a firm (or maintains an office) in india to approve ads and provide adwords customer service (via e-mail) in off hours.
i first noticed this when adding keywords and new ads in several campaigns late at night a few weeks ago.
an hour or two later, long after the folks at google USA had presumably gone home, there were direct hits to my sites from an IP address in india.
and this vistor then jumped from one unique adword URL to the next, generally staying no longer than 20 seconds or so on each landing page. (long enough to check relevancy, i guess, and to confirm that there were no pop-ups and that the back button was not disabled.)
so... look closely if you see india in your logs... it may actually be google!
(unless i'm somehow mistaken, although i can't imagine who else would have unpublished URLs only an hour or two after they were created.)
IP is not the only way to guess the country the visitor is in. A few other might be interesting to cross check that information (keyboard, local time). A bit a shame that Google does not get this info to guess the country... (I do not know any other company who does actually)
