Competitor clicking on my ads

[Boesman]

If a competitor keeps on clicking on my ad won't they spend my daily budget? I think this is happening to me. By 8am in the morning my budget is blown and my ad disappears! I have increased my budget dramatically over the past three days without success. During the past 3 months I have been on all the time. It cannot be that all of a sudden everyone is interested in my ad? My sales are declining fast. 1) Can it happen? I have not tried on someone else's ad (too nice and honest)
2) How do I stop it?

Please help as I am loosing money!

[bostonseo]

Pause ads at night

[WebEqualizer]

you can use <product removed> to track who is clicking in your ad, your be able to tell if it is a fraud and tell google about it so you get some credit back.

[edited by: eWhisper at 5:39 pm (utc) on July 19, 2005]
[edit reason] Please no product drops. [/edit]

[heyday]

Hold on a second.... I thought <product removed> was just for tracking Adsense statistics, not Awords traffic......

heyday

[edited by: eWhisper at 5:40 pm (utc) on July 19, 2005]
[edit reason] Please don't drop products. [/edit]

[WebEqualizer]

my bad, I use too many softwares and scripts i don't even remember which ones are which lol :) i cannot type any specific URLs' so you will have to do a search on google for adwords tracking.

Hope that helps.

[heyday]

Can you recomend any? It sounds like you have used one before....

Or can anyone else?

heyday

[Boesman]

So what you are saying is that it is possible and the only way to stop it is to complain to Google?

Not very cool. there are many unethical guys out there that will have no problem in "stealing" from you. There must be a better way. Surely google can see if the same IP is clicking on an ad every two seconds? Why don't they stop it?

The point is that they make money so they probably dont care and if you are unlucky as I am to have an unethical compettitor, then you are screwed... unless you are prepared to do the same thing, which I am not. I can just hope that they/he/she gets tired of this little game and that it doesn't cost me too much money. It is a loophole though that google should try and stop.

what do you think?

[eyeinthesky]

Boesman, Google does detect such fraud clicks (from same IPs) and they will credit your a/c when they do so.

I'm sure I'm getting competitors' clicks everyday but I don't care because with every click, my CTR goes higher and they are just helping me :)

These competitors are just idiots (and I do empathize with you).

Do you think they will get any good out of this? Bad karma, man ...

[Boesman]

thanks eyeinthesky,

The problem is that if they click repeatedly on my ad it disappears for the rest of the day. This is my only source of income. That's why I am so distressed. I will ask Google to credit me. Let's hope they can help. I agree with the comment about bad karma. Unfortunately their bad karma won't be my good karma and good karma aint gonna pay the bills!

[oldpro]

I recently read this thread with interest wondering if this could happen to me. Well...over the past few days it has. My CTR went thru the roof and had to increase my budget dramatically to keep my ads live. Then check my log files to see what was going on and found that a couple of competitors were repeatedly clicking on my ads. My CTR went to over 30%.

So...my response was to lower my CPC to half my original bid and keep my daily budget high. So far my ads are holding the top positions, but now my daily cost is less than half of what it was at the higher CPC.

My question is this...I want to hold my number 1 position, but will the action I have taken to counter this click fraud attack eventually drop my CTR and therefore my ad position? Historically, I am firmly entrenched in the top position so my reasoning is that I should maintain my CTR at the lower bid level...while at the same time capitalizing on my competitor's unethical behavior.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

[eyeinthesky]

Good thinking, oldpro :)

Lowering your max bid is a good thing as long as you maintain your position.

You got to watch it everyday and as soon as your position starts to slip, up your bid again.

That's turning an adversary into an advantage!

[oldpro]

i appreciate the reassurance eyeinthesky. like you said these people are idiots...you would think they would know they are being watched. it is amazing that someone would sit there at their computer and click on an ad about 10 times in a session ( all in about 15 seconds) then a every couple of hours through out the day go through the same routine. hopefully they will keep on doing it everyday to keep my CTR up.

With the savings they have afforded me maybe I can attack back with more variations on my keywords within another campaign...quadruple my traffic for the same cost.

don't you think google will eventually detect this? they say they have programs in place to automatically detect click fraud.

[gamb]

oldpro, it isn't as easy as you say it is.

There are a lot of people out there with high dollar, low volume clicks. Competitors clicking on ads can cost them a lot of money.

And despite what people say, google isn't always "watching" when it comes to repeat clickers. If a competitor clicks on your ads once every hour for 8 hours, I can just about guarantee that you will get charged for at least 6 or 7 clicks.