An effective way to stop adwords ad clicking by a bot?

Some of my competitors is spending to much time to ruin my ads, my money and my business...

What makes me think that he's using an clicking bot?
as soon as my ads start to go online there are always visitor coming instantly (at any time 0-24h) through my ad to the site, spending from 1 to 5 minutes on my start-/landingpage or just clicking through my site in record time, when one visitor leaves, the next one appears in about 10 secs. after i turned my ads to only display at mobile phones it went down for about 2-3 hours. then he knew that i switched over to mobile visitors and started again. yesterday i changed the location to a destination from uk to sweden to check if its happening anyway... and yup, few seconds later, it starts again!

all in all, for example 10$ will last for 3-5 minutes.

what i did to stop his click fraud?
- i installed clickguardian, an click fraud protection/detection extension for my website and got about totaly 30-40 ip's blocked in 5 days (but without help stopping him)
- i tried to block him through my htaccess (proxies, all ip's i got thorugh the "protector" etc...)
- i edited my adwords campaign about 50 times to focus on the second and third site
- i installled a chat-modul from tawk to get further information about my users and its always the same os and browser (ios, chrome)
- i blocked all ip's throug cloudflare for a while, but than i took all ip's out agian because of the possibility to not block out an customer

nothing worked and i lost my mind

- all logs and all informations i forwarded to google ad team (without an answer)

Site info: Online Shop, wordpress located

I'm also pretty sure to know which of my competitors it is (because of no where he started to copy my strategy placing images and adverteting inside the website like i do), but I'm not about to do him harm much more I just want to stop him clicking me out google and **cking up my money

Google usually refund the money from click fraud... If Google can't detect it, you would have to try and block all the ips with abnormal activity.

Jinyus said:

Google usually refund the money from click fraud... If Google can't detect it, you would have to try and block all the ips with abnormal activity.

Click to expand...

thanks for your reply, i tried to block all ips, but after all, he's using an proxy server-list and there is now way to find out which ip is next (tried to block a row of ips but i was scared to loose visitors also)

like i thought, there is no effective way to stop somebody doing this

blackhatgorilla said:

thanks for your reply, i tried to block all ips, but after all, he's using an proxy server-list and there is now way to find out which ip is next (tried to block a row of ips but i was scared to loose visitors also)

like i thought, there is no effective way to stop somebody doing this

Click to expand...

if he has many free proxies theres big chance they are public and shitty.

they often change from "hiding IP" to "not hiding ip". try to track his IP and possibly call his ISP/sue him? or whatever.

if hes using this many public proxies on you im sure they sometimes dont work correct and show his real IP address

Hmm it's odd if you can detect it and Google can't... their AI should be good enough to detect Adwords click fraud, I've got refunded myself many times. Maybe the click fraud took place just recently, and you will be refunded soon?

don chino said:

Hmm it's odd if you can detect it and Google can't... their AI should be good enough to detect Adwords click fraud, I've got refunded myself many times. Maybe the click fraud took place just recently, and you will be refunded soon?

Click to expand...

Believe it or not, you're wrong. Not because google engineers are dumb, but because they are lack of motivation. Why? Just think how much money google makes each year from their Adwords program. Even if "only" 10% of all clicks are fake / fraudulent / invalid - it equals to billions annually for big G...

We had the exact same problem as the OP, and it seemed to be impossible to solved (online gifts niche) :
We tried everything we could (even tried 'clickguardian' just like the OP), didn't work. What eventually worked for us is combining Adtector.com (another PPC click fraud detection company) with some smart campaign optimizations which complicated things for our competitors. They help us in marking those bad IP's and most importantly sent all the logs to Google (this file was containing tons of data which convinced google probably) so we got majority of our money back as a credit in our account.

Don't give up, keep fighting and don't let those scumbags win. EVER.