I was just reading a post about click fraud at the Young Entrepreneur forums. It mentioned some pretty nasty things your competitors could be doing to you if you use pay per click (PPC) services such as Google Adwords.
Statements like this are an example of a possible method that your competitors could be taking advantage of your PPC advertising budget.
I know of SEO companies who have scripts that will click on their clients competitors Adword ads until the competitors have hit their daily max spending limit. They do this to the ads above their clients ad, and once the competitors maximum spending budget is reached, Google removes the competitors ads, and the clients ad is at the top, and the program stops.
I myself use Google to bring in some traffic but I’ve never given too much thought to fraud since I hoped (perhaps naively) that Google and the other PPC providers kept on top of fraudsters. They say (that’s the word on the street, dawg) that Google has some fairly sound technology behind their programs which offer good protection.
The key thing is to be smart when using PPC. You need to be tracking your campaigns and monitoring results carefully. You should notice some indicators fairly quickly if you are a victim of fraud. You can’t just turn Google PPC on, throw some money at it and hope that you get more sales as a result. It takes time and maybe you should even consider hiring an expert or having a dedicated staff member manage your campaign, especially if you don’t know your CTs from your CT%.
If you can’t afford to hire specialists and don’t have the staff to do it for you, then do like most of us small business folk do, get educated so you can maintain your own campaign. A good place to start is the Google Adwords FAQ. You might also try third party sites such as Pay Per Click Universe.
Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager
Here is a great article about google adsense being hacked.
http://www.thehostingnews.com/article1008.html
Hi Yaro:
I was going through past posts and found this one. I have some Adwords campaign in Spain, a market much less competitive than the English speaking scene.
When I installed a software to better manage the campaigns and to control possible fraud (one thing that I never thaught would be important, given that I don’t make campaigns in webs, only search results) came the surprise…
More than 33% of the daily clicks was suspicious, some patterns were clearly fraudulent (more than 10 clicks in the same minute for example) when I informed Google their late response was totally useless…
So there is a BIG problem with this in my opinion.
Regards
This is an old post but it is still very relevant. Knocking other peoples PPC accounts for a loop with sabotage is still alive and well. Its unfortunate.
Amazing how relevant this post remains. I found it quite by accident and will practice better monitoring from now on! Thanks.
I’ve never thought of such fraudulent activity but I’d agree with you. With some close monitoring you should be able to track the activity within your PPC Campaigns.