Click Fraud?

[SusanneUK]

I have just been trying some Yahoo Search Marketing for about two weeks now and things have been going ok, this is my first time by the way.

Most of my products are Amazon ones.

Today I noticed a sharp jump in the amount of clicks on, well on almost every product (I use ReviewAzon, so this is from Dashboard stats that ReviewAzon create) and so after being elated for about five minutes, I got suspicious and went back and checked again and low and behold, one IP address is responsible for pretty much all of them - note they have not clicked the YSM ad several times, they arrived on the site from there and then proceeded to click away at everything on the site.

So my questions are:

Why would someone do this?
Is this what "click fraud" is all about?
Will this affect my Amazon Affiliate Account?
What should I do about it?

I have looked up as much info as I can find using the IP address but not sure what to do next, if anything?

Thoughts, comments, answers, any input appreciated.

Thanks
Sue

[MagicShovels]

I was effected by Clickfraud once, whoever it was ran up about 5x worth of costs compared to my average month. I asked around when it happened and most people drew a comparison to blue laws like jaywalking. It's something that's frowned upon but rarely pursued. Your best bet would be to contact the Yahoo SM Support team.

Good luck

[SusanneUK]

Thanks for your response.

I have sent a ticket in to YSM but I am more worried about my Amazon Affiliate account because the person has NOT clicked my YSM Campaign Ad lots of times BUT they have come through to my site and clicked practically everything, lots and lots of times - I can't check the stats in my Amazon account until tomorrow and I am worried that I will find they have frozen or cancelled my account.

If any has other answers to my questions in the original post I would be pleased to hear them.

Thanks
Sue

[MagicShovels]

If Amazon penalizes you for this you could take screenshots of the same IP that committed Click Fraud on your YSM account and send in a full explanation. Good luck.

[SusanneUK]

Yep that is a good idea, I will do that, thanks.

If anyone else has something to add to this, glad to hear it.

Sue

[nichewebstrategies]

Another thing to look for here is the presence of a BOT that is crawling your site. Not every bot is good and they definitely do not all honor the nofollow link attribute.

In your ReviewAZON click reports, you can grab the offending IP address and then match that with ip addresses in your AWSTATS reports. Then, you can take a look at the bot section and see if it is a bot.

The reason I bring this up is that I've seen this happening to a couple of my sites over the page few weeks and I've been able to map them back to bot activity.

I've been using YSM as well.

Hope this helps,

Brad

[SusanneUK]

Thanks so much Brad, I will try that

Cheers
Sue

[SusanneUK]

Brad

Where do I find the IP address of the bots? I am in Awstats and can see the IP address of the offending clicker but under Bots section, there are bot visits but no IP address for them, so how do I match it up? Sorry for stupid question.

Sue

[nichewebstrategies]

Sue, my apologies. I was under the impression that all Awstats installs had extended logging turned but it seems that is not the case. I looked on my Awstats on Hostgator and I don't see the same thing as my other host. So, it seems that my solution won't work for most folks.

Sorry for the confusion.

-Brad

[SusanneUK]

OK Brad, no probs, thanks for trying to help, it makes me feel better knowing it is probably a bot rather than some weird person.

So far today, my amazon account seems fine and in actual fact there were 3 orders that occurred yesterday, one of which was a high ticket item, so we will see if anything more comes of that and I will keep my eye on things.

As another poster suggested, I can always take screenshot of reviewAzon to send to amazon if they kick up a fuss of some kind.

Cheers
Sue

[AJsVRE]

Originally Posted by SusanneUK

Brad

Where do I find the IP address of the bots? I am in Awstats and can see the IP address of the offending clicker ...

Sue, if you know the IP address, just google "reverse ip lookup". I've used this to look at some IP's from my awstats before. Here's a link to the first result for that search, and is the one that I use when I'm looking up IP's:

Reverse DNS Lookup

You're not going to get detailed information, it's been a while since I've done it, but it was enough information for me to see that it was an amazon bot for the ip I was looking up. Give it a try.

[SusanneUK]

Thanks AJ, I will do that

Sue