impression spam tools?

[TJRvanden]

I am running several google campaigns and around the 22nd of December I realised the amount of impressions on one keywords went up to 10x of normal, but the amount of clicks I recieved remains the same.
On 23rd it went up to 50 times, 24th 70 times, 25th 70 times and on the 26th 80 times the normal impressions while I keep receiving the normal clicks. My CTR went from around 14% to 0.02%!

Worse of all is my overal CTR went from 12.2% to 3.1% now on about 300 keywords my quality score dropped. Amazing how much impact 1 keyword can have on the rest.

I have looked it up on the net and it seems we are dealing with some new fraud idea to kick out unwanted competitors and make money with adsense.

I have decided to pause everything and wait till google takes this into serious consideration to look at this problem.

Does anyone experience the same problem?

[edited by: eWhisper at 2:25 pm (utc) on Dec. 28, 2005]
[edit reason] Please don't drop links. See TOS. [/edit]

[wrgvt]

This problem's been around for years. Your campaigns might be on pause for a long time.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Restrict your ads to show in the narrowest possible geographical area and languages, and probably turn offr content and search networks for now (so that your ads just show in Google search).

This makes it much harder for would-be impression fraudsters, IMHO, to hide their identity from you and G.

Then gradually turn on the other networks and locations, etc, and see if you can spot when the fraud goes up again.

In any case if you let G know what you are doing it may help them track the source of the fraud, eg compromised bot-nets.

Rgds

Damon

[Murdoch]

Whenever I ask Google about this they always say it's a "new syndication partner" that is testing the system. Like you TJRvanden certain keywords have shot up to 10x of normal exactly. I am in the travel sector. So far this has not affected our CPC but believe me this has happened many time before and always I get the same vague answers. Your best bet if it does start affecting your CPC and/or average position (since apparently impressions from the search and content network do not affect your quality score - figure that one out) is to keep the keyword in for historical data but also put in a negative keyword that will stop the flow of it altogether. This has worked with limited success for us in the past.

Good luck to you and me!

[TJRvanden]

Hi Again,

My ads only come up in google search and I do not have the google content network etc enabled. So it cannot be from testing or any other influence imo. Also the keyword that I am talking about is an exact match keyword as well.

Our company spends about 20k a month on adwords and so I called google today telling them I paused my entire account due to this impression spam and will not continue untill my CTR is figured out and recovered.

The representative suggested me to only stop the campaign for this 1 keyword and continue with the rest, but i decided to stop everything hoping they want to make money on us again. He reviewed my account and did not admit anyhting, but also could not tell me what it could have been. He send this issue to the google spam/fraud team and told me within 1 week he will come back with results about this issue.

Thanks again for your responses