PPC click fraud

[rob3786]

Hi,
A friend of mine has a large non gaming website he advertises through ppc. He spends alot of money on ppc monthly and is currently experiencing a problem. Last year he was spending $40,000 a month on ppc and in google adwords it showed a certain amount of hits. His budget now is $80,000 a month and google adwords is displaying doble the amount of hits but analytics hasn't changed much from last year. He expects click fraud what can he do to prevent this, he is angry at the moment as so much money is going out and he expect rival businesses to be clicking to hit his bufget so his adds are dropped.

[MrKay]

With that kind of monthly advertising costs I would definately look at using a professional product to double check what you are paying for, there are plenty to choose from out there (click auditor, whosclickingwho etc)

Both these products will give you an indication of wether there is suspicious activity, like clickbots, clickrings, paid-clickers etc

[Spin21]

I agree, if you are spending that kind of money it makes sense to pay someone to look at this, as on average you can expect between 10 to 25% fraud anyway. This doesn´t necessarily matter, if the price of the click is reflected.

What I would recommend, is to track all of the google traffic sources seperately, or as much as you can- so you have searches form google, searches from their partners and adsense ads etc etc. You can then look out for the offending referrer who is sending you the junk traffic and either strip it out of your campaign or report them to Google- actually I would do both.