Google Click Fraud or What?

(Note this entry has been edited since it was originally posted. I still strongly suspect that I received many fraudulent clicks this weekend, however I no longer can prove it. It turns out that the trackback that I was investigating actually is a facade that Google uses to intentionally *hide* the source of certain types of clicks. They are investigating this for me now.)

I just got back from State Conclave and I have a lot to say about the weekend. I also have many photographs to share. However, this particular post will have to come later. Today I want to make a comment about my brief experiment with Google AdWords.

When I got back from Conclave I checked my Google AdWords to see if I had received any traffic to my site promoting the Lake Property I am trying to sell. I was very excited to see that I had received hundreds of clicks! My first thought was one of excitement, here it is Memorial Day weekend and lots of people interested in Lake Property were seeing my ad and checking out my site. I even got one lead over the weekend from someone interested in the property.

My excitement quickly turned to painful dissapointment as soon as I checked my trackback log.

All of the 'clicks' came from URL's more or less identical to this one.

If you edit the URL so it goes to the root page, all it shows is 'Nothing to see here!' This site is part of a 'bot-net' that autogenerates clicks to feed AdSense profit back to a network provider.

Here is an article about the problem.

I suspect that somewhere around 80% of all of the 'clicks' I was charged for were caused by click-fraud. I woke up to a $200.00 advertising bill most of which was completely bogus.

I sent an email to google and received the following response:

Hello,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned about invalid clicks in your account. I've reviewed your account and found that you did receive a numbner of clicks over the weekend from your content network.

From May 25 to May 28, you received 10 clicks from the search network and 233 clicks from the content network. You can view this information on your Ad Group Details page.

Additionally, I have included information on invalid clicks and how you can prevent them. Google takes invalid click activity very seriously, and we've developed both automated and human review strategies as part of our efforts to help prevent invalid clicks.

First, our sophisticated proprietary technology analyzes all clicks on Google AdWords ads. When our system identifies clicks we believe to be invalid - for example, repeated clicks generated by robots - these clicks are automatically filtered out of your reports.

In addition to our automated technology, we employ a team of human reviewers to track and monitor invalid click behavior. By tracking invalid click trends, we're better able to improve our technology to combat invalid click activity.

We actively enforce our strategies for detecting invalid click activity. If we identify an advertiser or Google network partner as an unethical user, we will take appropriate action on any related account(s).

If you have additional questions about Google's click protection strategies, please visit our AdWords click quality FAQ:

Just a quick update. I don't have a lot of time to research this further but, first, I was able to find a form I could fill out requesting a refund for the bogus clicks. I sent that report in and we will see what happens. Second of all, I'm not entirely certain that I can ascertain just which clicks were bogus simply by looking at the link 'pagead2.googlesyndication.com'. When I searched around the internet on this URL I got mixed results. Many people claiming this was the source of their fraudulent clicks yet others that said this is actually part of how Google 'hides' the source of some of their content partners.

Either way, the click activity was clearly bogus. The legitimate trackbacks always point to perfectly reasonable websites that are hosting valid advertising.

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Ok, I should probably edit my original post but, what the heck, is captures my initial emotion. Apparently all of these trackbacks are coming from Google. Google *hides* the source of its 'content network'. I still think all of the clicks I got, or most of them, were bogus, but I have no way to prove it since Google is hiding the source of these hits.

I found a FAQ entry page about it.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=35472