Adwords Click Fraud / Invalid Clicks

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theunit

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Aug 13, 2007
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Does anybody have any advice / experience on how to detect / monitor potential "invalid" clicks to your Adwords campaigns?

I know Google has their own thing for filtering out invalid clicks, but I have no idea how good they are at it. It seems to me that it would be pretty easy for one of my competitors to build some kind of GOOD click bot that is run through a large amount of proxys, clicks my ads for different keywords, then stumbles around my site, then exits. This can pretty easily drive me out of business.

So, besides the obvious monitoring your conversion rates and looking at multiple IP address clicks, is there anything else you can really do to prevent this, or any tools that can be used?

Would getting a database of all "known" proxy IPs and TOR exit nodes and seeing if there is a high percentage of these clicking your ads be a good idea?

Or trying to find high percentage bounce rates or site browsing behavior that doesn't make any sense from clicks?

Does Google do any of this already? If anybody has any experience with this, or has an experience where they were successful in presenting their case to Google and getting a refund, I would love to hear about it. Thanks!
 


If you want to seriously diminish the amount of click fraud you're getting, stop advertising on the content network. That place is wretched hive of scum and villainy.
 
I'm not sure, but I don't see why they wouldn't try. I'm just interested in seeing what experiences people have with this, and if I need to get my own system in place for detecting this, or if Google's system is good enough to stop intelligent, automated click bots that could click me out of my daily spend in a half an hour....
 
Nobody has any ideas? And I thought all you people here were very knowledgeable and could get some good conversation going about this....

I guess I'll just have to post this over at digital point to get some intelligent conversation going about this....
 
theunit said:
Nobody has any ideas? And I thought all you people here were very knowledgeable and could get some good conversation going about this....

I guess I'll just have to post this over at digital point to get some intelligent conversation going about this....
Click to expand...
Yeah. This question belongs to DP. They're more intelligent than us.
 
theunit said:
Nobody has any ideas?
Click to expand...
i think your guess is about as good as anyone's. even if you identify a clickbot, google only allows you to block 20 or so IPs from seeing your ads, which sucks. i would like to prevent all adwords competitors from seeing my ads. pretty easy to identify a competitor when you see x number of visits w/ no actions over the course of a week or so in your access logs. when that happens i usually just deny them in my .htaccess. that way, at least they can't monitor changes to my landing page.
 
theunit said:
Nobody has any ideas? And I thought all you people here were very knowledgeable and could get some good conversation going about this....

I guess I'll just have to post this over at digital point to get some intelligent conversation going about this....
Click to expand...

You should invest in one of these.

tin-foil-hat.jpg
 
If there was serious click fraud, you'd know because your stats would vary by crazy. Realistically, there is 5-15% - You can get a click auditing tool, then send the monthly report to your Google AM for credit.

I managed a $750k monthly budget, and overall clickfraud was low. Basically paid for the software, and not too worth it.

Don't worry about clickbots, since Google only charges for 1-2 clicks per ad, per ip. Clickbots are fucked. Another point for filtering is if fraud was prevalent, Google wouldn't be in business because clicks wouldn't convert.

I wouldn't worry too much and if you are, signup to a click audit tool. Let us know your results.
 
Thanks. If Google only charges 2 times from the same IP, that would be great. But is this only 2 a day from the same IP, or 2 all time?

I don't know, I'm still a little paranoid, as I don't think it would be that hard to build something that cycles through all the Tor exit nodes (these are changing as well, there are new ones all the time).

I guess maybe you just have to accept the fact that there is going to be a small percentage that Google doesn't catch, and chalk that up to a cost of doing business with Google.....
 
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