adwords+adsense fraud robot (external)
Updated: the whole fraud story.
I really wonder why Google, Overture and the kind don’t reveal what is
the exact amount of fraud clicks in their Adwords types of programs.
The percentage must be huge, and probably it would discourage some guys
from continuing their PPC campaigns. However transparency would help
building up the idea of a healthy business. But let me stop this blabla
and get to the real issue.
I run some user tracking scripts, based on log analysis, something that I have developed myself. I run this on a few websites that I own. One of them, a really young website, is under a global Adwords campaign for some quite popular search terms, at the exact PPC survival rate. This campaign run fine since a few weeks, but yesterday it experienced something interesting. 30 times during one day, at different hours, the same Internet user supposedly clicked on an Adsense advertisment. I have the IP, the User agent and the Adsense client ID, and I’m willing to share it to the ones that should take care of this. The same thing repeated on a smaller scale with other IPs but the same Adsense client id. Therefore I’d say this is a Adsense fake clicker robot, touching my Adwords campaign. To speculate, after looking at this faker, I’d say this is a custom made script, and this idea alarms me even more. The level of amateurism is really surprising! No further clicks from the homepage, no proxy used and so on.
Luckily for me, as I said this already, I do spend the minimum for my Adwords campaigns. Therefore this Adsense faker got really little for faking clicks on my ads. However I have to wonder, what happens to all the websites that don’t run this level of log analysis and do spend more on clicks. Hidden under the Adwords content clicks section, with little to zero defense available to faked clicks, who stands there to protect the Adwords campaign payers?
With all the avancement in the API direction and stuff, it’s really surprising that basic issues like this coordinated Adsense-Adwords click-fraud campaigns are not addressed properly. I hate to repeat myself, but I wish there were more transparency here.
and this stuff goes on and on…
