Competitor Clicked All My Adwords Ads Until Balance Depletion

by lovboa Banned
4 replies
  • SEO
  • |
I created a new site and I wanted to test out the response to see if I should put a little more work into it.

The great thing was that the serps are absolutely packed with competition, but noone was advertising with adwords.

The average click came out to be $0.25 so I put $35 into Adwords and ran a campaign. It was great at first.

Why do I think that a competitor clicked on all my ads?

Last night at 2am, I changed my geographical targeting from every country to only the United States and Canada. At 2:10, I noticed that people were still coming from foreign countries. Not only that, but all of a sudden they were just mass coming to my site.

Now, remember that at 2am I targeted only United States and Canada.
From 2:10am - 2:40am, I had about 60 clicks all from various countries. None were from United States or Canada. Each lasted 10 seconds or less and none were coming from search engines (paid ads).

Could it be that a competitor has used proxies with all different IP's and just mass clicked on my ads to lessen my budget?
#ads #adwords #balance #clicked #competitor #depletion
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi lovboa,

    It sounds as if you made a error in the settings for your account. AdWords will only serve ads to the geographical locations you have enabled in your account. Perhaps you should take a close look at the Location options (advanced) settings. There are settings there that let you control precisely what regions can view your ads.
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    • Profile picture of the author lovboa
      Banned
      Originally Posted by dburk View Post

      Hi lovboa,

      It sounds as if you made a error in the settings for your account. AdWords will only serve ads to the geographical locations you have enabled in your account. Perhaps you should take a close look at the Location options (advanced) settings. There are settings there that let you control precisely what regions can view your ads.
      Hi.
      I did do it correctly. I use adwords a lot and I made sure that was set correctly.

      Is it possible, though for a competitor to use different proxies and IP's to click on them from the US, but with IP's from other countries?

      I know I may sound paranoid , but the behaviour of the mass traffic that I received combined with the fact that I did set the geographical locations to US and Canada only is what bugs me.
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Originally Posted by lovboa View Post

        Hi.
        I did do it correctly. I use adwords a lot and I made sure that was set correctly.

        Is it possible, though for a competitor to use different proxies and IP's to click on them from the US, but with IP's from other countries?

        I know I may sound paranoid , but the behaviour of the mass traffic that I received combined with the fact that I did set the geographical locations to US and Canada only is what bugs me.
        Are you absolutely sure?

        Which of these 3 settings are you using:
        • People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location
        • People in my targeted location
        • People searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location

        The second option is the only one that restricts your ads to people in a specific geographic region, is that the one you selected?
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  • Profile picture of the author lovboa
    Banned
    Don,

    I was using the 1st one!
    Darn.

    I had set up the targeted locations to US and Canada, but did not go into the advanced options.

    Thanks for your help and for teaching me something new.
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