If you ever doubted click-fraud...

[gary]

Got this in my email today courtsey of searchengineguide.com. If you use Google's PPC then you might want to read it, though we've all known about it for a while now anyway:

http://timyang.com/comments.php?id=672_0_1_0_C

 

[c4l]

Would an Adwords account be potentially subject to this too??

 

[gary]

Yes, this is all about AdWords - your ads show on someone else's website and every time the ad is clicked on fraudulently you pay. You may be able to reduce this by switching off the Content option in your campaign settings, though I haven't really looked at it to make sure.

 

[c4l]

My server provides quite a good detailed access log.

It's annoying when you turn on Adwords and get 27 hits in a day from Bolivia at a cost to you of £0.10 per click! I know it's only £2.70 but then the chances of me exporting a car to Bolivia are 0.0001%!!! £2.70 a day x 31 days in a month soon starts to become expensive for something with so little value to me!

 

[Amber]

You can set the ads so that they don't show up on the content network, and just show up on the Google search pages, which stops adsense publishers doing this kind of thing.

Still doesn't stop your competitors doing it, though!

 

[c4l]

So i just untick the box to show ad on the 'Content' part and just leave the Google box ticked. Surely the Indian clickers can just surf on via google then?

 

[Amber]

Well, they can, but I'm not sure what they would gain from it?

If an ad is being shown on someone's website, the webmaster is getting a percentage of the click cost (for want of a better word ) So the webmaster has a vested interest in wanting people to click those ads.

If the ads are only showing on searches, then all of the profit from clicks is going to Google themselves, who we can (hopefully!) trust not to be paying people for click fraud. That's my understanding of it, anyway.

If you're having problems with too many clicks from countries you don't supply to, you can specify which countries you want your campaign to be displayed in.

 

[free0870numbers.co.uk]

For a while I turned off the content side of things for my adwords account but I noticed a drop in sales.

So now I have a seperate campaign with lower click prices for content ads. This seems to work better.