Competitors clicking on our PPC Ads

[wisedave]

Hello,

Has anybody heard of a way that a competitor can continue to click on your ads and exhaust you PPC budget?

It seems as though I am getting a lot of clicks but also a lot of bounces....

Ads and landing pages are targeted so I am confused. Invalid clicks are being caught...but I am still suspicious!

Cheers,

Dave

 

[wisedave]

Is there some sort of script or bot that does this kind of thing? I am interested in finding out more about this....

Cheers,

Dave

 

[KlaAz0r]

you can do it with simple auto clickers if you want

 

[wisedave]

you can do it with simple auto clickers if you want

How do those work.....I've never heard of it.

Thanks mate,

Dave

 

[proweb]

AdWords is Google's main revenue stream and I can vouch that the chances of someone getting thousands or even hundreds of invalid clicks to your ads without Google noticing would be as likely as a tornado hitting a junk yard and assembling a jumbo jet out of junk parts.

Without going into too much detail here are some of the ways that Google detects invalid clicks:

1. IP
2. Browser
3. Browser fingerprint
4. Computer fingerprint
5. Search patterns
6. Geographic location
7. History of searches to clicks for all ads within a geographic region compared to the performance of your ad
8. Your CTR history compared to your competitor's CTR history
9. several other things

The only way someone could get away with it is if they changed their OS, Browser, IP, Geographic location, Installed Fonts, Installed Addons, and clicked on the other person's competitors websites at the same rate as your website as to signify to Google a global increase in interest for that particular search query.

 

[SyZygy]

Hello,

Has anybody heard of a way that a competitor can continue to click on your ads and exhaust you PPC budget?

It seems as though I am getting a lot of clicks but also a lot of bounces....

Ads and landing pages are targeted so I am confused. Invalid clicks are being caught...but I am still suspicious!

Cheers,

Dave

Seems like A1vaps is fucking around with you lol

 

[dennisyu]

What i want to know is, why don't they implement frequency capping on search ppc.

 

[wisedave]

Seems like A1vaps is fucking around with you lol

Not sure what that means mate.....

D

 

[nielsencl]

It could be competitors, but it may not be. I set up a campaign on the content network for a legal topic and when I went back a week later I had lots of clicks, and very high conversion rates of up to 200-300%!

I discovered that something about my campaign caused the ads to be picked up by a lot of GAME sites and they were clicking like mad, AND going to the site and filling out the form so conversions showed up.

You may just have great ads that people click on, then they find out your site sucks, or your landing page has problems.

But if you really think it's a competitor and they aren't too smart you can look at where the traffic is coming from under "Dimensions". Look for GEO locations where it shows you have a very high CTR, but little or no conversions. You can block those locations as they show up and fight the problem that way.

All those clicks may help your Quality Score, so that is one good thing.