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Situation with Adwords and possible click fraud

by Scootek
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I wanted to describe a situation to you all, and to see what you all made of it.

I have this site. In the first 2 years, I did not do any PPC, and got all the new business enquiries via natural search. In the last 6 months, through my own neglect, the site dropped in the SERP's. So I started advertising using PPC. Now, if I use ball part numbers as fairly accurate example, I used to be able to spend say £100 a day and get about 8-10 new job bookings. I could spend £20 a day and get 2 for example. After a while I found that if I spent £20, I would get 1 or 0. So naturally I thought there must now be more competition for the keywords, so I increased my budget, and re-optimised my campaign. What I found was that I could double or tripple my budget but I was getting the clicks but no new enquiries. And if I was getting enquiries it was minimal. The enquiries had reduced by more than 90% which is huge. In that time the site or nothing on the site had changed. Even the guys at Google said that my site was good compared to my competition. So I spoke to a few people who thought I may be suffering from click fraud. So I complained to Google who agreed to investigate. Their findings were that there was no click fraud that they could see. Although I did not agree with them, I was powerless to do anything.

So, I started my campaign again, with even bigger budget, and kept an eye on things. What I found was strange. If I stopped my campaign for while and then started my advertising again, in the first 1 or 2 days I would get huge amount of enquiries like I used to, so I could spend £100 and get 10 definite bookings. However, after 1 or 2 days, the click still happened and Google ate all my money, but I would get 1 or 2 new bookings. This makes me really suspicious. I feel that once a competitor or someone see's me advertise regularly again, then somehow I become the target. I cannot prove that click fraud is happening, but my gut instinct tells me that something definitely is not right.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Thank you.
#adwords #click #fraud #situation
  • Profile picture of the author movemaker
    Here area few tips that you can try to do...

    1. Try and contact Google and see if they notice any type of click fraud going on. They have technology for it and they "should" be able to determine the fraud if its there.

    2. Look at your Google Analytics and see if you have a sudden "spike" in your bounce rate. If you see the stats telling you that the same visitor is just visiting and leaving the site very quickly then this might be a case of click fraud.

    3. Google Analytics should let you know what time the visitors came to the site and you should be able to analyze the time frame in which "repeated fraud clicks" came in based on time of each click and how quick they visit and leave your site.

    If you see that you got like (eg.20-30 clicks in 30 minutes) and thats not usual to you and your campaign then you may be a victim of clickfraud. The timing of the clicks and the bounce rate should give you indicators.

    Also, in your GAnalytics you should see something called "custom variable" and you should see ip addresses there. Thats also something to look at. If you see consistant IP's over and over again coming in at a certain time frame then thats a good sign of it as well.

    In closing, remember to contact Google AdWords and ask them to see if they see something. If they don't see it keep fighting until they see it. If that dosent work then you'll just have to live with it.

    Also remember that it could be certain keywords causing the massive amounts of clicks as well.

    Hope that helped!
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Originally Posted by Scootek View Post

    So naturally I thought there must now be more competition for the keywords, so I increased my budget, and re-optimised my campaign.
    There's your answer. You can't re-optimize a campaign. You have
    to test first. By "re-optimization," I can only assume you mean you
    changed it, from keywords to text. Did you not think that may
    have a major effect?

    Why not leave the campaign as is, and up your budget?

    All you had to do was increase your budget, if that was
    worth it.

    Your campaigns are now getting searches "optimized" for
    something people don't want when they click.

    Paul
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi Scootek,

      There must be a few dozen, or more, possible causes for the results you have monitored. Click fraud is only one of many potential causes of those results.

      As a rule, I try to never manage my campaign budgets using daily budget limits, that is generally a poor way to manage campaign spend levels. In nearly all cases it is much better to manage campaign ad spend by adjusting bid levels, not daily budget limits.


      Here are a handful of things you did not mention in your post that would be helpful to narrow down the potential causes a bit:
      • Have you monitored Quality Score levels and have they changed?
      • Have you separated Display network campaigns from search network campaigns?
      • Have you tried disabling plurals, misspellings, and other close variants from triggering ad impressions?
      • Have your produced Search Term Reports for your campaigns, and if so are there irrelevant keywords that need to be added as negative keywords for your campaigns?
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  • Profile picture of the author StoneWilson
    Well, the best way I can figure out is contact Google and ask them to help you, they have more detailed information than we have in Google Analytics account. And if you are new to Adwords, start your campaigns more slowly would be better, set up the max money for each day, do more tests, choose more related keywords, all these can help you to save budget. Remember, before you know the game rule well, don't be too rush.
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  • Profile picture of the author Scootek
    To All,

    I have contacted Google. I will do some of the things that you have suggested. The truth is I have now spent days going over in detail things that I can do to make it better, but I don't know how much more I can do and none of it is making a differenec.

    @ PaulGL, when I said I optimised the campaign, I did not change keywords, as there wouldn't be a point. I made minor changes so that overall campaign had better quality score etc.
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Originally Posted by Scootek View Post

      To All,
      @ PaulGL, when I said I optimised the campaign, I did not change keywords, as there wouldn't be a point. I made minor changes so that overall campaign had better quality score etc.
      Sorry, but the only way to do that is to get a better CTR. So, what did
      you do? The only way would be to change the keywords you were
      targeting. There is no way that you can stop, then start the SAME
      thing and think that's "optimized."

      You don't raise your QS doing anything other than raising your CTR.

      Even this quote: " I made minor changes..." Exactly. Whatever
      changes you made were futile. It's not the same campaign. Again,
      what did you expect?

      There's no click fraud. Besides, you are doing search, right?
      Who's going to be wanting to make money on clicking your ad?
      Your competitor? Hardly. That's quite a huge stretch. In fact,
      there's an easier way. You just keep searching for the same
      thing, over and over, that gets your ad to pop up. Do this
      several times, and your QS goes down because nobody is
      clicking!

      I don't know why you don't see the truth. You changed the campaign,
      even if it was minor, to be something people are clicking on and
      are getting something they did not want. The only way you get that,
      is by changing when your ad shows. Period.

      Don't blame google and their searchers for the changes you made.

      Start over. Do more testing. That's what you should be doing.

      Paul
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      • Profile picture of the author Scootek
        Paul,

        Lets say what you say is true. So, let's say I start a fresh new campaign today, how would you explain getting say 10 enquiries on days 1 and 2 and day 3 onwards, it going down to 1 or 2. Whereas every day in the past, I would get 10 enquiries, week in week out. If you can explain that to me then there are no arguments from me. But I have found that most people cannot give me an explanation that makes sense.

        This is not about blame. The only person to blame here is me, because I took my eye off the ball. However, I am 99% something is not right. It may not be click fraud, and it maybe that. I will probably never know. Whatever it is, I must try and find out what it is, to atleasst attempt to tackle it.

        I hope that makes sense to you.
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        • Profile picture of the author dburk
          Originally Posted by Scootek View Post

          Paul,

          Lets say what you say is true. So, let's say I start a fresh new campaign today, how would you explain getting say 10 enquiries on days 1 and 2 and day 3 onwards, it going down to 1 or 2. Whereas every day in the past, I would get 10 enquiries, week in week out. If you can explain that to me then there are no arguments from me. But I have found that most people cannot give me an explanation that makes sense.

          This is not about blame. The only person to blame here is me, because I took my eye off the ball. However, I am 99% something is not right. It may not be click fraud, and it maybe that. I will probably never know. Whatever it is, I must try and find out what it is, to atleasst attempt to tackle it.

          I hope that makes sense to you.
          Hi Scootek,

          While I wouldn't automatically rule out click fraud, I would not immediately jump to that as the likely cause. Statistically speaking, click fraud is not the most likely cause, it is far more common to see that pattern cause by falling Quality Scores, as a result of relatively low CTR as compared to your competitors' CTR.

          You can easily ascertain that by tracking your Quality Scores to see if they have dropped over time, or check the ad positions to see how they trended over time.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    I don't know why people always go with click fraud as the explanation for everything. The system has checks and balances for this sort of thing, it's unlikely click fraud is the reason.

    You said you optimized. Not changed keywords but I assume you tested new ads. Well, you could have affected the click rate, obviously, but also the conversion rate. Yes, you could have ads that help or hinder the conversion rate. The best approach would have been to increase the budget with the same ads and see what happens.

    But there may be a more mundane and logical explanation.

    Let's assume for simplicity you have two keywords. However, one converts really well but has less impressions and a higher CPC. With a lower budget, each click for that keyword takes a larger percentage of your budget. This leaves less to the higher impression, lower CPC but lower conversion keyword. The effect is at a lower budget, a reasonable ROI.

    But by increasing the budget, that lower performing keyword gets more clicks and a bigger share of your budget. You may be getting a 100% impression share of the higher performing keyword but diluting it all by giving more shares to the lower performer. Maybe all you need is split that keyword to another group with different ads or drop it altogether. That's part of the optimizing of your campaign as much as testing new ads and adding negatives.
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  • Profile picture of the author Scootek
    Anyway, thanks to all for the comments. The guys at Google have tried to help. The have called me several times and gone through it. In their opinion, they believe my campaign follows all the best practices, and the two people I spoke to at Google adwords department said that there wasn't that much more anyone could do to improve it. I do not claim to be an expert on Adwords, but I have spent serious amounts of time on improving my knowledge on it.

    What I have decided to do is go back to basics. Do a very simple campaign and and monitor it. Let's wait and see.
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    • Profile picture of the author FrankRumbauskas
      You need to use a third-party tracking solution like StatCounter or ConversionRuler to view statistics. While click fraud may *statistically* not be the likely cause, the reality is that there has been a huge surge in click fraud originating from spammers using the Amazon cloud. There are 100,000s of IP addresses there, so Google won't catch the clicks as fraudulent because they are all coming from unique IPs - but if you use your own tracking script you'll see they're all from Amazon.

      If you do in fact detect activity from Amazon AWS data centers then do the following immediately:

      In your campaign, geographically block the location of the two Amazon AWS data centers:

      Zip code 98144, and Ashburn, VA

      Also block countries that frequently host click fraud sites:

      Germany, Italy, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, Egypt, China, India, Samoa, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Netherlands, Niue, Micronesia, Romania

      Use the broader of the two blocking options: Exclude People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my excluded location

      After you do all that, call Google to submit a click fraud report, and export all of the fraudulent clicks from your tracking software to send to them. If you're lucky, they'll take care of it and you'll get a refund for the bad clicks. They really do care about this and will help you out as long as you can provide the logs.

      Good luck!
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