Click Fraud

Click Fraud out of Turkey

[jkc1]

Just wanted to share some numbers and see if any others have experienced the same thing. Any remedies besides eliminating the Content Search option for the PPC program?
Started a new PPC campaign on Jan 4th 2006
Jan 4 - Present
65% of web traffic from Google PPC program
65% of web traffic from Turkey (where we do absolutely no business and never had more than 1 click a month from tops)
65% of web traffic exits in 0-10 seconds

[jkc1]

Should clarify that the 65% from Google PPC program are from Content searches.

[Israel]

Any remedies besides eliminating the Content Search option for the PPC program?

jkc1,

Well if you believe that the Content Network can be made profitable otherwise, then sacrifice that one Turkish visit a year (sorry, potential customer!) and take Turkey out of your country list in your campaign Location list for starters.

Sadly, it's often not practical to let the entire world in on your list in the location list under campaign settings. "All countries" is the default.

You can also block the domain they come in through the AdWords UI. Still, click frauders have a huge array of tools available now to stymie some of the obvious defences we have. I'm sure others can suggest a few more options to keep them away from your ads.

It sounds like some "Made for AdSense" network of sites there has your ads showing since I advertise in Turkey too and never noticed an inordinate amount of traffic from there. A few other countries I have to bypass though....

Unforunately, because of the PPC model, click fraud represents a sizable amount of PPC income and if they were to be truly pro-active in preventing it, they may find a house of cards collapsing around them from a revenue standpoint.

I'm a little tired of the response that I often see that click fraud is simply a cost of doing business, like shoplifting. Where are the police though?

Israel

[netmeg]

If your web traffic is exiting in 1 to 10 seconds, can you tell if they are actually loading the entire page? For example, I had some suspicious-seeming traffic coming through on the Yahoo Content Network, and when I looked at the log files, I saw that the clicks in question weren't even loading the entire page every time - there were maybe 15 or 20 different graphics on the page, by the time you count spacer gifs and whatnot, but the clicks from this source weren't ever loading anything but the page itself, and sometimes one or two graphics at most. Looking at the logs won't help you prevent the traffic, but might give you some ammunition to go back to Google with.

[jkc1]

Thanks, that is a great tip and something I had overlooked in the Settings.