Google Adwords Ignores Click Fraud

I've been using adwords almost since day one and run a large amount of campaigns and adgroups containing hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords. I do affiliate marketing for the most part and promote many different products in various industries.

A few months ago I setup a new campaign promoting some anti-spam software. Everything went well and the campaign was very predictable with an average ctr of 1.5 - 3%. Then I went away on vacation. I was camping so I didn't have access to a computer. When I got back and checked my campaigns I saw that while I was gone this particular campaign had jumped from its predictible 1.5 - 3% ctr to an abnormal 35 - 40% ctr. At the same time there was no increase in traffic to my sponsor, or an increase in sales. I immediately concluded that a competitor had used a hitbot on me to drain my pockets, since I was one of the top bidders on the keywords I was targeting. The increase in traffic was obviously fake and it had cost me a few thousand dollars extra over a 10 day period.

I immediately contacted Google about this. After talking to an unsurprisingly incompetent customer service rep, and struggling to explain the concept of a hitbot and artificial clicks, I was told that there would be an investigation which would take about 3 weeks. That was almost 3 months ago. I have heard nothing from Google. I have sent several emails asking what the status of this investigation is and have not received any replies. It is obvious that Google doesn't care about click fraud or its customers.

Has anybody here had any similar experiences on Google with click fraud? Did Google compensate you for it? Or did they simpley take your money and put you on ignore like they've done with me?

I am verys sorry to hear about this. That does sound like terrible customer service. I have not experienced any such issue so I can only offer you sympathy. Perhaps some other members have more to offer.

So, despite your asking them to work with you, they still are ignoring you? Have you had your raw web logs from that time period looked at? They may show a revealing story under scrutiny that you could use as ammo to get Google moving. Good luck, keep us posted if you can on how things go.

This is one of the main problems I am having in proving the click fraud. In that particular campaign I was sending the traffic directly to the sponsor I was promoting. Since the sponsor's site has no popups it makes more sense to send the surfers directly to the site rather than to one of my landing pages first. As a result none of the traffic hit my server which gives me no server logs.

The most frustrating part of all this is the traffic I was getting to this campaign had developed a very consistent trend in ctr. Then, without warning the ctr spiked. All the Google people need to do is look at the abnormal spike in ctr and compare it to the previous activity and they would come to the same conclusion as me.

In answer to your other question, yes, they are still ignoring me. I have sent several emails asking what the status of this investigation is with no response. Then I sent another email explaining the situation again and asking someone to contact me about it, but again I've received no response. So words of advice to everyone here. Watch your campaigns at all times and don't count on Google for customer service if a competitor attacks your keywords.

[ Message was edited by: Duzer 09/29/2003 08:10 am ]

Bummer . Anybody else have some thoughts or experiences to share on this topic? Poor Duzer must be feeling lonely about now.

You can try contacting googleguy, who is the company representative at webmasterworld.com

Document as much as you can. Time and date of who you talked to and what was said/promised. Saved emails with full address headers. Any technical statistics that you have, and the reporting dates and stats by Google.

I hope you get everything settled. We all get disgusted at Spam manipulation, but the manipulation of Adwords is a very serious and direct threat to the Google business and its reputation.

[ Message was edited by: yellowwing 09/30/2003 08:01 am ]

Do you have an account rep at Google? That would be the first step, contact them and they should take care of you. If you don't have a rep, try calling back their customer service number and demand to speak with someone that is in more of a management position than the tier1 person that you will initially talk to. It sounds like the person you intially talked too was clueless and just told you their would be an investigation to get you off the phone, I would assume they never actually initiated such a thing.

Talk to a manager and stand your ground, let them now how it is absolutely unacceptable that you are being held responsible for these charges and also how they have been handling your complaint. Sometimes you got to become the a*****e to get the service your due, but its better than nothing.

If all else fails, contact your credit card company and try your best to explain to them that you are not responsible for what they billed you, and you can maybe reverse the charge. This would probly be a bad move though, as I would bet they would kill your adwords account if that happened.... but you might want to think to yourself if adwords is something you want to continue to support if this is how they treat you.

Sorry to hear about the whole situation, sounds very frustration Good luck.

[ Message was edited by: patrickh 09/30/2003 09:02 am ]

I am hoping it turns out to not be fraud, but the symptoms are worrisome. I was considering sending an e-mail to Google about this situation and directing them to read this thread, but thought that may not be something you would like done.

Have you heard anything yet from Google? It sounds to me that as patrickh metioned, you ran into some very unhelpful individuals. To not hear back from them is completely unacceptable and very unprofessional. Good luck and let us know how things are going.

Still haven't heard anything. I will follow up with the phone next and try to get a manager to settle this.

I thought about doing a chargeback with my credit card, but, as was said, they would probably kill my account. This is frustrating, but my Google campaigns are profitable so I don't want to lose them.

I'll post here and let you all know how it works out. Whatever happens, however, the customer service has been pathetic.

I haven't run into this on Google or Overture YET, but we did have a run-in with click fraud VERY recently on Findwhat. The most ironic thing in the Findwhat case is that I'm almost positive who's doing it (because it started only a day after I noticed their listing added among the top bidders - the rest are all familiar faces) yet they and their site has absolutely NOTHING to do with the keyword. So my big question in addition to "why has my traffic on this one term increased by a factor of 20 while ROI-tracking shows my sales have not increased one dime over the norm" is "how in WORLD did this site get approval for this term?" There's red flags all over the place that clearly prove my point, it's just a matter of whether or not they address them and how soon.

We just ran into this last week so I'm curious to see how Findwhat handles it. They've always seemed to offer much better personal, customer service than the other two in my experience, albeit a good bit slower. Hopefully we'll never have to experience this with Google or Overture because the financial issues at stake are obviously MUCH higher.

[ Message was edited by: Parrothead 10/01/2003 01:58 pm ]

Hi Everyone,

As promised, here's a quick update on how this has been going. I followed up on the phone and played voicemail tag with one of the managers, which was followed up by email. She promised to make sure this mess got sorted out and assured me she would have the right people investigating it.

Today I got a call from one of the guys who will be handling the investigation. He also apologized for the way this has been handled and promised to have an answer for me in the next few days. He also credited my account with some funds for the problems I've had in resolving this. These funds have no bearing on the outcome of the investigation or any compensation I will receive as a result.

It seems we've finally gotten off on the right foot. Of course I still want to be compensated for what I know are fraudulent clicks, but at least I'm not being ignored anymore. Google admitted I received poor customer service the first time around, and added funds to my account as compensation for that frustration. This is a step in the right direction.

"It seems we've finally gotten off on the right foot." I'm not too sure. It seems to me that you have been 'forced' into kicking some people around with that "right foot" just to get someone to notice it so that yall could use it. But thats just an opinion.

More information on dealing with click fraud:

http://www.alchemistmedia.com/CPC_Click_Fraud.htm

P

Glad to hear about the contact from Google. Thanks for the link above Pelagon.

Hi Everyone,

Seems I may have spoken too soon. When I spoke to the last guy at Google (I'll keep his name out of this) he told me he would get right on this and give me a response in 2-3 days. That was almost 2 weeks ago. Yesterday I called him and complained on his voice mail. He returned my call at 10:00 p.m. yesterday evening and didn't know who I was I refreshed his memory and he said he would have to look into it with the click fraud investigations team, and give me an answer telling me what the status was. So my original complaint was in the beginning of August and now we are in November and I'm still trying to get this resolved. I am not amused.

There is one thing he said that I think you will all be interested in. He said that the click fraud investigations team was severely backlogged! So this problem seems like it is a lot larger than they are letting on. At any rate, I'll let you all know what happens.

Thanks, sorry to hear things are dragging on.

Hi Everyone,

Today (November 11) I got the results of the investigation and Google ruled in my favour and stated that the clicks were indeed fraudulent. They have credited my account with the full amount that I was defrauded for and promised to implement security measures so that this type of fraud doesn't happen to others. We'll see... I'm just glad to get my money back

Thanks for all the advice. Hopefully this thread can help others so that they don't have to go through what I went through. Cheers

Thank you Duzer, this thread is of great value and should help others. I am glad to hear you are finally being compensated for this fiasco. If this is possible, would you share with people here what the characteristics of the hitbot clicks were?

In what way was Google able to determine the hits were fraudulent? Any information you are able to provide may help members suffering something similar, but that they do not recognize. Thanks and all the best.

Mark, the guys at Google didn't tell me exactly how they were able to determine the clicks were fraudulent, but it was pretty obvious what was going on. Just the fact that the ctr jumped from 1.5-3% ctr to 35-40% ctr alone is enough proof in my mind. Either way, they said they would take measures to prevent this in the future.

I can share what I know about hitbots, however. I'm not an expert, but I've had past experiences with cheaters and hitbots on sites and toplists I've run in the past, as well as some experiences with other ppc engines. Essentially, the way a hitbot works is to create artificial clicks through the use of hundreds of proxy servers. As a result, Google's tracking software sees each click as a unique surfer clicking the ad and counts each click. This is different from a competitor physically clicking on your ad over and over, since they will be doing this through one IP address, so Google will only count one of the clicks since all are coming from the same user.

Finding evidence of a hitbot is difficult, since in some cases sophisticated software is used. What you have to look for in your server logs is proxy server IP addresses, and a lot of activity from proxy server IPs. Sometimes, the person's IP can show through as a few of the proxy servers may not be anonymous. This is how you can catch the person who is attacking you. But like I said, this is difficult to do. And the other problem is that a lot of legitimate traffic comes through proxy servers as well, so this makes things even more complicated.

The only advice I can really give is to watch your campaigns and know your traffic. All traffic establishes trends over a period of time. If you see any prolonged suspicious, or drastic changes in traffic patterns, then you may have a problem. If you are convinced that you do have a problem, do not waste a lot of time with the front line client services reps. I did not find them very knowledgeable or helpful, and it was only when I moved up the chain of command that I found people who knew what I was talking about and were able to produce results.

Cheers!

Thank you, that is great information and will certainly be useful to somebody else. I hope this is the last such incident like this you experience (ya right, sigh ). Thanks Dunzer!