Adwords Alert
- SEO |
Some friends and I were recently alerted to "suspect" traffic that was visiting our websites when advertising with Adwords Content Network. This was from genuine sources but from countries that are often banned by advertisers as producing very poor conversions - and hence low quality scores capable of getting our accounts canceled by the advertisers.
As these countries had not been enabled we were puzzled and explored the issue further. It seems almost all of those visitors were running the Opera Mini browser on Symbian OS - the browser and embedded OS for Smartphones and PDAs. Apparently Big G is not filtering out these country/IP addresses when you leave the default "enable Adwords on iPhones and mobile devices" still ticked!
Disabling that option helps in that it reduces considerably the unwanted traffic getting through.
However, some "banned" countries still seem to be getting past the filter. Almost all of these are using Symbian OS devices.
If you value the quality of your traffic and don't wish to pay for traffic that is of little use to you, at the very least disable the mobile phone option.
Ivan
As these countries had not been enabled we were puzzled and explored the issue further. It seems almost all of those visitors were running the Opera Mini browser on Symbian OS - the browser and embedded OS for Smartphones and PDAs. Apparently Big G is not filtering out these country/IP addresses when you leave the default "enable Adwords on iPhones and mobile devices" still ticked!
Disabling that option helps in that it reduces considerably the unwanted traffic getting through.
However, some "banned" countries still seem to be getting past the filter. Almost all of these are using Symbian OS devices.
If you value the quality of your traffic and don't wish to pay for traffic that is of little use to you, at the very least disable the mobile phone option.
Ivan