Detecting Adwords Click Fraud

What made you think it was click fraud when you investigated further? Google is pretty good about filtering and refunding for low quality clicks. I get a refund in my account almost every month.

That's why I stay FAR away from Adwords especially. Some competitors tend to get rather spiteful and click, hit "back", click, hit "back", etc. (yes, it's happened before).

Click-Fraud is definitely on the rise again, although the scaremongering in 2006/7 that it would bring down the internet were wildly overblown!

That said rates of fraud do very from vertical to vertical and the country you're targeting.

In terms of Google policing click-fraud, you can argue that they have little incentive to clamp down too hard on it which would impact on their revenues.

Whatever the case we've seen cases as high as 15%+ on some campaigns.

We use our own product TrafficCake, which although was designed for detecting fraud in media buying campaigns we started using on PPC when we because concerned as to very peculiar patterns of activity.

My view would be to use a traffic auditing tool, and where you detect fraud challenge Google to not only refund you, but ask why the clicks slept through their own preventative measures!

In all likelihood, it's not click fraud. First, Google has systems in place to prevent that sort of thing.

You must analyze and ask yourself what could have changed before jumping to the conclusion that it was click fraud. First, you don't say if you changed your ads. You may simply have done so with an ad that gets a much higher click rate. Did you increase bids? You don't mention that as well. Has your average position increased? If it did, then either a) you have a better ad or b) you increased bids or c) other advertisers have dropped out or d) any of the above combinations. Also, did you make any changes to keywords: adding, removing, new match types, negatives? Any change you make to ads and keywords can have an effect either positively or negatively depending on whether you do the change right or wrong.

Has the number of impressions increased? If there's click fraud, that would be a clue. That is harder to see unless there's a many fold increase.

Monitoring this is very time consuming. Basically, you just have to put faith in Google that they do this for you. And they do, they have the resources. Best to put your efforts in actually improving your campaign instead of worrying about click fraud which is fairly non-existent.

As Dan said, if there is actual click fraud, you'll get a refund. Typically it's around 2-4%. Some may not even be click fraud, a poor choice of terms by the way. I've seen refunds for clicks that generated sales.

There are a ton of things that can cause an increase in CTR outside of click fraud.

I've seen some campaigns in certain niches where competitors hit their monthly budget limit near the end of the month and drop out for the last few days. My ads move up a couple of spots, CTR goes through the roof compared to where it was.

I'm not saying it is not click fraud, but Google is pretty good at detecting it. Their whole AdWords empire depends on it.

Yeah, it's definitely tough to be 100% sure it's click fraud, when we know that Google doesn't just idly let that sort of thing slide. Hope you figure it out, though.