Adwords show record day of clicks.
Adsense show record impressions (lower cpc of course ****s)
Web logs show lower than average day.
Sales and aff sales --> NONE.
If AW is right 2/3 of my usual website visitors came via those adds.
Why have all my usual visitors stopped clicking on the page 1 search (1 keyword) listing and instead choose to go to one of G's partner sites and click on my adwords. Is this a new form of surfer or just b......
Enough ranting. Whats the best way of finding click fraud? How does everyone catch the naughty people? What do you look for in the weblogs. And why is it me that has to spend time looking.
yours
not very appi
are you looking at something like 5 times the normal amount of clicks? perhaps just a bad day of conversions?
I find it strange the server logs have started to lie to me just as clicks from adwords increase.
Oh and I must tell the advertisers that thier stats for impressions are wrong.
here foloow G is great threads.... or possibly best ways to catch a thief.
Wouldn't you if your own server logs say usual days stats yet the big G says wrong that was your best day ever
No. Happens to me several times a month. My daily traffic is not large enough to make such fluctuations statistically unlikely.
It would be helpful when posting a "gosh this is unusual" thread if people would give some rough indications of the magnitude of numbers being compared. A 100% fluctuation from a norm of 100,000 visitors per day is much more significant than the same percentage fluctuation on a 100 visitors per day website.
I realy should stop with the click fraud thing and accept that I had my worst ever visitor numbers for that day.
I must add it was nice of G to increase my ad click through on that day to account for the sudden drop of regular visitors and make my weblogs look normal. Thank the lord no ones evil.
Alternative question.
Hey how do you fellow adwords clients detect click fraud. Just incase it should ever happen. Which it never will cos it never happens ever.Ever. Thanks.
If I suspect click fraud I contact adwords support, they have always been very helpful and investigated.
Hey how do you fellow adwords clients detect click fraud.
Well, I'm on that side of it too, and it's pretty much the same answer: know enough statistics and enough about the nature of your samples to know what is really statistically implausible instead of entirely within the realm of normal random variation.
The only time I know for sure I was click-frauded as an AdWords advertiser, I saw implausibly high traffic for a low-traffic keyword, then sat there generating reports until I was able to demonstrate that there were hour-long periods where the CTR via Google search was 100%. Followed the reporting procedures Google published and got my money back in a couple of weeks. Next time I tested that keyword, the click fraud was gone.
That shows that really, really dumb and blatant click fraud can go on without automatically being detected by Google -- or maybe they would have figured it out eventually.
If there's a really skilled (i.e., skilled in not attracting attention) click-frauder out there, you'll never detect him, any more than you can detect someone skimming a fraction of a percent of interest off your savings account. Google's the only one in a good position to detect someone doing smart click fraud with an army of zombie PCs to help them thinly inflate a few hundred (apparently) independent AdSense accounts. I'm sure there's a couple Google folks losing sleep over that problem.
Seriously, pause the ads next month at the at end of the month and do it every month from here on out.
Spent several hours yesterday going through the raw logs.
One strange thing I have noticed in the logs is whole blocks of requests for nothing other than the css files of the site. This is from a subdomain of shop.ukl.yahoo.com. Anyone seen this in thier logs? The actual yahoo url goes to a 404 on yahoo.
This annoying thing is messing any stats you try to view through either webalizer or awstats. Hence why im chewing on raw logs with grep.
Another is sets of requests from the search. Wish I could describe it better but until I understand something fully Im useless at asking questions;)
So is it fraud or my RAW (the email annoyed me) logs. At this point im not sure. Lets say maybe at some point Ill shout yahoo im wrong. And be able to continue.
Anyway the accounts paused G doesnt get any more pennies. Somone else should now be happy thier keywords are now showing on p1.
ps
For anyone thinking about click fraud. Nobody is going to spend this long trawling through server logs. Easy innit.
quick question.
I know you can block sites for adwords but can you block sites from googles partner network?
Has anyone ever actually got an email that says 'hey perhaps were wrong, sit back why we look further into it'. I can dream.
Yes, I asked them nicely to have a look cos I thought certain clicks were probably fraudulent, and they did. About a week later I got an email back saying I was getting a credit back.
Why is that? Why the end of the month? -Larry
Take a look and see if you see the same thing. It's easy to fix; just pause the ads.
One day I'll learn someting without making an ass of myself. Right restart that ad then whoo hoo.
sorry!
Well done for 'fessing up; too many people report only their complaints and don't admit that G isn't the only one capable of making mistakes!
(And, for the record, my earnings were down last month! Black helicopters ahoy! B^>)
Rgds
Damon
