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?
You 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.
With Google, I've found that it's almost always best to know someone there. In this case, the OSO team.<p>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.<p>No system's perfect, unfortunately.
On 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.<p>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)<p>I wonder how many people have similar experiences.
Have 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.
It'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.<p>They key is to monitor your AdWords every day, it's all in the numbers.
I'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.