Espotting doubles in traffic - click fraud?

and Business.com goes 10 fold

[Gmorgan]

Just completing my weekly report and last week my Espotting clicks doubled what they normally are. This was quite suprising and when I looked closer one term which normally receives a click or two received over 50. I then looked at my Business.com clicks for last week and they were 10 times what they normally are!

Can anyone explain these results with a conclusion other than the one I'm getting - Click fraud? Anyone else seeing the same?

Also, I don't really have much evidence to present to either company apart from these reports and the unusual patterns within them. Would these qualify as good enough evidence to get a refund?

[seth_wilde]

Sounds like something bigger than a Christmas rush.. Unfortunately I think your going to need some more evidence to get a refund.. Do you have access to logs or a tracking system to analyze the traffic?

[Gmorgan]

I do not have any tracking systems in place but forwarded a selection of my logs to Espotting to go through and am awaiting their response

[GerBot]

i had a similar problem with Espotting.
The last two days of last month saw one term jump through the roof

before:
50 clicks/day
1/10 conversion
then:
1500 click/day
3/1000 conversion

Espotting seem to think that is normal

then this month every thing went back to normal.

BTW: ad copy, bid and rank was the same throughout.

[tigger]

I had this problem last month and spoke to the rep as my traffic shot up. after checking the keywords I noticed a trend on a few of them and they investigated it, the same day I got a return call with a refund, but I've now stopped using them due to the poor quality of traffic

[sem4u]

I don't use Espotting anymore but I would check in the Yahoo & Google SERPs to see if one of their partner sites has climbed up. This may be the source of any additional clicks.

[Gmorgan]

I doubt it is anything to do with partners as traffic has gone back to what it was ever since.

Espotting claim that it wasn't fraud and I didn't get a refund. I'm hardly suprised though, after reading other people's experiences with them.