adwords acting strangely

[Country Services]

We have three keywords in one of our adwords campaigns that are acting strangely this morning. This particular campaign has been running for well over a year and produces stable and predictable results.

One particular keyword normally generates around 700 impressions per week with a CTR of over 9%. However, in just a few hours this morning over 450 impressions have been generated with 0 clicks. We have been running effective campaigns for over 4 years and this is completely abnormal. Two other keywords in this campaign are similarly affected. Apart from these, no other keywords in this or any of our other campaigns is behaving abnormally.

I appreciate that as no-one is clicking, it is not losing us money, but I am concerned about the affect on our CTR, and would be interested to know if anyone can offer an explanation. For example, do google carry out any kind of activity themselves which might do this?

We do get a small surge in searches when our area of business is in the news and after sending out press releases (but not usually on this scale) and in these cases CTR tends to be even higher than normal. We have effectively had around four days' impressions generated in a couple of hours this morning, but with no click through at all.

I have paused the three affected keywords for the time being.

Hope someone can throw some light on this

Pippa

[Country Services]

I have done some more research. It would appear that we have been hit by 'impression spam'. Apparently competitors do it to remove your ad from the top position (which we have worked hard to maintain), and thereby reduce the cost of gaining the top position themselves.

However, havent yet found any information more recent than 2005, so if anyone has anything to add, that would be great

Thanks

Pippa

[tomsk]

Pippa

Have you tried to contact google adwords with your concerns?

Link below:

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/request.py

[Country Services]

Hi Tom

Thanks for your reply and the link.

I managed to email google yesterday. I found their list of questions a bit muddling, as nothing was relevent to my problem, and several 'contact us' links led to 'page unavailable'

Eventually found impression fraud tucked away under the heading of click fraud in their support list. Hopefully they will be able to identify the culprit or at least ignore these impressions for the purposes of my quality score.

Pippa