

Ask YC: What do you do about fraudulent clicks? - inovica

Hi there. One of the sites we run suddenly had an increase in Adword costs, maxing our limit each day, without any increase in sign-ups.  We've done some log analysis and it appears as though some IPs are clicking on Adwords on a regular basis, therefore costing us money. Some of our clicks are up to $3 a click, so when one IP has clicked 40+ times on our terms it looks like it could be a competitor trying to cause us problems. For anyone on here who has experienced the same thing, what have you found to be the best way to deal with Google to either get a refund or to try to block this practice?
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mynameishere
You can block certain IPs. It's in the documentation. You can also complain to
google support and they might refund it. Also: try yahoo's search advertising.
It's actually not too bad.

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inovica
Thanks. I didn't know that we could block some IPs. That will really help
EDIT: Just done this. They allow up to 20 IPs to be blocked (just if anyone is
interested)

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Mystalic
With Google, I've found that it's almost always best to know someone there. In
this case, the OSO team.

Barring that one, you've just to got to follow up with Google. They respond,
it just takes time. Ask the AdWords boards. Pull any words that seem to be the
targets of fraud. Become more creative with your ad campaigns.

No system's perfect, unfortunately.

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bluelu
They probably don't want their system to be perfect. Just on the same level as
the competitors, because fraudulent clicks bring them money as well.

If an IP clicked 30 times on the same ad, then there is something fishy going
on. If you were using Adsense, and it happend on your site, you probably
wouldn't get paid per click or would get banned, if they track the Ip to your
ip adress

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mattmaroon
Fraudulent clicks don't bring Google more money in the long run. They reduce
the amount of actions per clickthrough the advertiser sees, causing the
advertiser to value each click less and therefore bid less.

So if it increases your clickthrough rate by 5x (without increasing signups at
all) you'll simply pay 1/5th the cpc. Long run of course.

They also cause small guys to quit using AdSense. Therefore Google has
significant incentive to combat it.

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inovica
I don't agree to be honest. Its not that we will quit, its just that we need
to pay more money for each customer we ultimately receive. We can't _not_
advertise on there unless/until we have another means of driving qualified
traffic in, so we have to just take it in some respects. We have another
product, SourceGuardian, where we were paying considerable sums each month. We
switched off the network adsense sites and our sales didn't drop at all. We
haven't monitored this site for fraudulent clicks, but we're spending around
$300/day on this other site so we thought we should check everything

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mattmaroon
But in the end it's all about CPA, not CPC. CPC is sort of just a go between.
You base your bottom line decisions around CPA. If it takes 10x the clicks to
get the same CPA, then you'll pay 1/10th the CPC (or you'll go out of
business).

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rbanffy
On the other hand, I was getting about (please, don't laugh) US$10 a month out
of AdSense in my blog (which is not really a blog, but I gave up naming it
anything else) when Google said there were fraudulent clicks coming from my
site and that they would not tell anything more about it because that would
compromise their detection techniques, but, still, I was banned from AdSense
for life.

In the end, it worked out: I changed banner providers (I started rotating
between two international networks and two local web merchants, adjusting
probability of each source according to origin and revenue stats) and have a
much better ad revenue (which is not to say it is anything great, but just
about anything is better than US$10/month)

I wonder how many people have similar experiences.

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thorax
I've been experimenting with adroll.com a bit. Mind mentioning the two
international networks you started favoring?

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rbanffy
Oxado and Adbrite. I am not very happy with any of them. Started with Adroll
because of your message. Ads seem more on spot than Adbrite and on par with
Oxado.

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Harkins
Have you looked into the IP address? On a Unix command line, do 'whois
0.0.0.0' to find out what network they're on, possibly where they are. Contact
abuse@ at that ISP and tell them one of their customers is violating Google's
Terms of Service -- most ISP ToSs say it's a violation of their ToS to violate
anyone else's ToS.

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josefresco
It's a win/win situation for Google regardless of what they do. If they ignore
and let the fraud happen they get paid more, if they combat it, they look like
the "defender of online advertising" and people love them for it.

They key is to monitor your AdWords every day, it's all in the numbers.

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gojomo
I've heard aggressive blocks of geographic regions and specific origin sites
that appear to be sources of problem clicks helps. Also, dropping AdSense and
off-Google search partners entirely, if necessary.

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inovica
Thanks. I've done this so its only pure Google searches now. I think its one
or two of our competitors ensuring that we pay more on a daily basis. On IP
clicked on us in one day 15 times. It doesn't sound like much, but it cost
approximately $50 just for this one day.

