Adwords bot war

I am sorry, what does landingpages do? I looked their website briefly, but how is that going to help us with the adword clicking bot?

the only thing I can tell you is that at some point everybody goes through this.
competitors are a$*holes... they are not going back down... just because they are doing something, they think they have some kind of patent on it and it only belongs to them and they are the only ones making a living, and if anybody else is doing the same they are stealing their profit.
it happened to me 3 times during last year, the only way I got them to back down was to do the same to them.
google can easily predict fraud clicks but they don't care at all, you either have to quit or fight back with the same weapons.
if they are making it hard for you to make money, make it hard for them as well. fight them back and after a few days send an anonymous email from a friendly competitor and let them know you are willing to stop if they are willing to stop too. otherwise, keep going. give them a taste of their own medicine.
I would love to hear a better solution, I can use it too. but I couldn't find any way to stop them.
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one easy solution, to make some profit while you are fighting this is that you use 80/20 rule.
since you mentioned you already ran this campaign so you have some data that shows you who is your most profitable customers (based on country or city). you can target only those cities and countries.
the chance of their bot having many proxies on the same city or country is very low. and even if they have it, you can block them which shouldn't be many. (most likely they are using global proxies)

that aint a bot btw..

If it is not a bot, then what is it ?

We already narrowed down to 30 miles radius within our radius, still getting hit of 20-25 clicks an hour on average. We want to do the same back to them just to get them to stop. They know they have an advantage and they are going to keep going until they start feeling our pain. We would hate to use a bot or something similar, but from reading all this, it seems that's the only solution to have them back down. But also someone warned us about google banning our account. But how and for what ? And if there is a way, then how can we get google to ban their account for the nasty business they doing using the bot?

I dont really have much to contribute to, but just reading your thread made me feel the pain you are going through.

So nice of you that you arent being unethical back. You are such a good guy.

Cant you just call them up, tell them you are aware of what he is doing whether or not he accepts it, and if they continue, you will also have to do this making it fail for both of you. Can you try talking?

We tried talking to them but they want the whole market for themselves. They failed to scare us and trying to shut down our website because we did not steal any design as they claimed. So now they doing the dirty work to run us out of money. We explained to them that we can work as a team and at the end of the day, each person has family and bills. But nope, they still decided to go this route. And again, we can show all the evidence that someone is using a bot to kill our budget if anyone here suspects that we are trying to start trouble with anyone.

How were you able to do the same back to them just to get them to back down ?

Moved to lounge as you are not hiring anyone it seems.

@dandan594594 said landing pages because you said they were targeting your url. You would set them up on different domains with links to your domain and you could also presell some on that LP.

You could also just recreate your site a dozen times and put the same site up on a dozen urls and rotate them so that the competition would have to continually look for you.

Sounds like you have some nasty competitors.

You could use different domains with different landing pages, but will have to create new ones every so often as your competitors will eventually target those too.

Google is charging you for fraudulent clicks and doesn't seem to do much about it. Not a surprise as they really only care about the big guys when it comes down to it.

Another thing you could do is create generic landing pages that cannot be tied to your domain or business name and use churn and burn AdWords accounts. Then capture emails from the landing page and/or have a phone number that redirects to your number. Just make sure the landing page cannot be tied to your business name.

Now I know I sell AdWords accounts myself, but I would mention this even if I didn't. I hate seeing people get screwed over by competitors like this and by Google. Ironically, I started buying and creating accounts because I was getting fraudulent clicks as well.

But that does not stop them from clicking the ads if I am correct. I can be wrong, I think their bot is targeting our URL because no matter what keyword we use, it seems to find us.

Alex Edison said:

But that does not stop them from clicking the ads if I am correct. I can be wrong, I think their bot is targeting our URL because no matter what keyword we use, it seems to find us.

Click to expand...

Register multiple domains and make ads with those urls. Make a good page about your business, or more like a second design of the actual website. And keep rotating domains everyday. You could ditch the domain everyday and make a copy of the content to the new one.

Couldn't ypu negative keyword your url so when they search it by url it doesn't come up..your customers will be searching with normal keywords anyway

By clicking your ad's they are also driving up your click through rate and increasing your quality score against themselves. You need to call Google's Adowords hotline and talk with them about this, they should have more advice... including possibly ignoring offending IPs or something else that could essentially stop the problem. However, IMO unless you have a VERY low budget your competition is only helping in the long run.

-ThopHayt

As your competitor increases your click through rate he should be also causing your CPC to lower, making each click cheaper and helping you in the long run.... now this a side you can do this:

Use Geo-Targeting to only show your ad's to the city your restaurant is in and in surrounding cities you choose. Then collect the IPs of the clicks you believe are fake and ban them. This has a good chance of stopping them unless they have a LARGE pool of fake LOCAL IPs available, which would be VERY expensive to them...

-ThopHayt

You need to read your logs.
Since you claimed you have already a ratius of only 25-30 miles it means he is using local IP's .I guess he is using his own Internet connection to rotate local IP's .Try to find the major Provider of the fake traffic and ban that provider.That could stop him.
Another solution could be a transferpage for a day where you can check which IP's are from a bot and which not.Make a clear data analyse.You said you are getting arround 100 clicks.Using the transferpage will give you some good information about the botter,what kind of IP's he is using ,if only from a single provider etc .
Once you got that information go to police and make a report delivering the IP's asking to check them with the provider if somebody local used at that day all these IP's .
Once you were at police i would send a copy of that report to both competition so they see that you take action and that they can be traced back if they used local residential ip's

As your competitor increases your click through rate he should be also causing your CPC to lower, making each click cheaper and helping you in the long run

Click to expand...

Your statement makes no sense.Also if the price goes down by 2/3 how is it going to help her when 1 out of 10 clicks is real ?

Pause your ad campaigns for awhile. This will probably get your competitors to stop their bots and after a week or so, start it up again. Sure, you'll see a drop in bookings, but should recover you some cost.

Google cost per click is cheaper since you only need to beat the person lower than you by 1 cent to rank higher if you have higher quality score. Keywords quality scores calculated by few methods, one of them is click through rate.

Alex Edison said:

Google cost per click is cheaper since you only need to beat the person lower than you by 1 cent to rank higher if you have higher quality score. Keywords quality scores calculated by few methods, one of them is click through rate.

Click to expand...

I would constantly and dynamically generate the html, so their bot wouldn't be able to find the ad correctly and needed to update their code frequently.

Because the bot has to be able to locate your ad first before it can click it. Assuming it is a bot and not just some guy with too much time clicking it.

We have no idea how to do that, we have no experience in programming or the technical behind running the websites, bots etc..