Would You Block This Traffic?

Hi everyone. I'm running some PPC campaigns with Google and Yahoo and noticed some visitors coming from this place: www.gcdetective.com/members/view.php?keyword=x&cat=y. I visited that site and not really sure what it is, but it gives me the impression that people are looking up my keywords to see what im paying so they can decide whether or not to click it to cash in on adsense ads they may be running. maybe this is paranoia on my part...

another site that refers traffic is findcarinsurances.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi?username=etc --- since my site has absolutely nothing to do with cars or insurance or car insurance, this looks like garbage traffic that people are clicking on to make some money.

so my question is would you block these ips? and would you report it as fraudulent clicks?

thansk for any advice!

This Squidoo blog talks about what the Google Cash Detective program does. I don't see any way this program knows what keywords are successful - or how they're defining "success" - and can't even determine that they're looking at specific accounts rather than just pulling the typical keyword research you can get from many other programs.

Can you tell if you paid for the clicks coming from that source?

The second site may be a Made-for-Adsense (MFA) site. If you go to their
search page you can type in any search (not just insurance related searches) and each search displays what is probably one ad at a time and the ability to page through many more.

You can are running content ads you can block specific sites from within your AdWords account. Blocking the IP doesn't do much because you get charged when someone clicks on an ad whether they can reach your site or not.

There is additional information about what this program supposedly does here. It is making the assumption that changes to which keywords trigger which ads over a period of time indicates that they are successful.

That would only be true for advertisers who have sufficient expertise to evaluate what is working and what is not. Although there are certainly many affiliates who are experts at optimizing their profits, the majority of the users of Google AdWords do not actively manage their accounts with any kind of logical reasoning.

If you can target affiliate advertisers who are exceptional, that type of program might provide some kind of advantage. Knowing what ineffective advertisers do might be worse than not knowing anything.

[link]

This is a directory that has referred quite a bit of traffic to me, but no sales. Is this what leelee700 was talking about?

When I went to that link my anti-virus program lit up and I quarantined whatever it was. I wouldn't go there. The way I evaluate traffic is this: if you've had 2-3 times as much traffic from the site as it would normally take to make a conversion and you haven't seen any then eliminating that traffic probably wouldn't hurt you.

If all the visitors from a referrer bounce that is an even bigger red flag and I would quickly move to eliminate any traffic you're buying from a source like that.