Google sued for click fraud (Adwords)
 

A class action lawsuit was filed in US District Court against Google alleging breach of contract, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair business practices-all involving charges of click fraud. Click Defense Inc, a click fraud protection firm, filed the suit in California in the name of an unknown number of plaintiffs for an amount not less than $5 million.

Click fraud is the term used in the Internet search industry to describe the practice of clicking on search advertisements to run up the costs on advertisers.

Click fraud, estimated by some to be as high as 20% of all clicks, is caused by those with a vested interest using software that clicks on the ad hundreds or thousands of times to either drain the advertising budget of a rival company, or create revenue for the seller of the ad space.

The lawsuit claims that since 99% of Google's revenue comes from advertising, Google has a huge financial interest in doing little about the instance of fraudulent clicks and criticizes the search giant for failure to disclose its own estimate of the number of fraudulent clicks.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/bl...nsevgoogle.pdf

Now that's very disturbing!

I've noticed pretty steady drops in conversions in some of my AdWord campaigns over the last several months. Clicks to my ads, on the other hand, have increased.

Early this week I stopped showing my ads in Google's "content network" cause I was concerned I was getting a ton of bogus clicks.

Today I was looking over my AdWords stats and noticed I was being charged for several clicks on keywords which the stats also showed no impressions for. I'm just not clear on how an ad can get clicked on when it hasn't been shown.

I'm going to have to keep a very close eye on things this month. :(

Regards,
SF

Sounds fishy to me...

If the numbers are VERY small, you might be seeing residual clicks on pages in cache memory or pages that bots have stored (google cache pages).

It happens.

Alex

Thanks Alex,

That's something I hadn't considered and will keep in mind as I monitor my AdWords stats in the future.

Regards,
SF

Here's a question - I paused 1 of my campaigns over a week ago as I was getting no sign ups for this particular ad. Checking my adwords stats I see no extra clciks since I paused the campaign, but the sponsor shows 187 clicks in the last 5 days from google for terms I was bidding on. How is this? I'm extremely new t the adwords game, so if someone could enlighten me I'd be grateful. 187 in the last 5 days seems high for cached pages, or is this indeed what it must be?
Thanks guys :)

Jel - it might be clicks from network partners such as Earthlink that use Googles results - they usually take a while to take down the ads after you pause a campaign - sometimes Google comes back and charges you for the clicks - sometimes they dont :) There TOS does allow them to charge for them as they dont get a report from the partners till sometime later

Yeah CPC has been interesting this year so far ... definitely an increase in click fraud especially from content sites, but I just tend to turn them all off now.

If you believe you have been hit then contact your google rep. I have noticed a few times that traffic increased a whole heap yet sales stayed steady ... and after they looked into it i was getting hitbotted and got credited back. Helps to have some evidence on your end.

Yes, I've come to the conclusion that content sites are a waste of time and money as well, especially over the last couple of months, so I've got all my campaigns set to just search results now.

who is click defence? http://www.clickdefense.com/
publicity stunt to promote their business. this story is on websater boards everwhere so it is working for them.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=276712