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Ask YC: What do you do about fraudulent clicks?
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?
- Mystalic 18y agoWith 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.
- bluelu 18y agoThey 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
- mattmaroon 18y agoFraudulent 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.
- bluelu 18y agoSo why do they bill 30 times for a click from the same ip? This is one of the simplest fraud patterns to detect. (And I bet they have some kind of mechanism to find out if an ip is a gateway for more computers or just a single user pc) I simply think that they don't care, as long as the money comes in. 5 years ago I met a guy who was running an empty website just with a banner on it. He was running some kind of click generating software and was making about 1000$ a month with it,even though on the website was nothing more than the banner of the ad provider. They didn't kick him, probably because noone complained and they were making money as well!
- inovica 18y agoI 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
- mattmaroon 18y agoBut 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).
- dhimes 18y agoUnfortunately, they don't seem to have time for the little guy any more. However, I've had excellent results with Yahoo and (believe it or not) Ask.com.
- gojomo 18y agoI'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.
- inovica 18y agoThanks. 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.
- mynameishere 18y agoYou 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.
- inovica 18y agoThanks. 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)
- rbanffy 18y agoOn 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.
- thorax 18y agoI've been experimenting with adroll.com a bit. Mind mentioning the two international networks you started favoring?
- rbanffy 18y agoOxado 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.
- josefresco 18y agoIt'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.
- Harkins 18y agoHave 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.