Campaign budget and Google sending junk traffic

mikebro68 · Apr 1, 2023

Hey guys, I have a few questions regarding how Google manages your budget and the traffic they send...

So, when you set up a daily budget for a campaign in Google, they give you a cap for the month. For example, I recently switched my daily budget to $100/day for one campaign around March 20th and they said "in March, you won't be charged more than $2,100" or something...

The thing is, there is not a lot of search volume for the terms I'm targeting in this campaign, and I've been consistently getting an average of 80-100 clicks per day for the whole month. Not even a single day did the campaign spend close to $100.

However, on the last day of the month, all of a sudden I received 398 clicks! and a total spend of $200, with what appears to be junk traffic because none of them converted. I was getting consistent sales on the other days, but on the day when I received the most traffic, I only had 1 conversion when I was averaging around 3-4.

What does this mean? Do they send you bot traffic to spend your budget and match what they told you you were going to be charged for the month? I'm currently using Max CPC as my bidding strategy. If I switch to Target ROAS and give it a budget, will it force spend the budget while matching the desired ROAS?

roydan · Apr 1, 2023

mikebro68 said:
Hey guys, I have a few questions regarding how Google manages your budget and the traffic they send...

So, when you set up a daily budget for a campaign in Google, they give you a cap for the month. For example, I recently switched my daily budget to $100/day for one campaign around March 20th and they said "in March, you won't be charged more than $2,100" or something...

The thing is, there is not a lot of search volume for the terms I'm targeting in this campaign, and I've been consistently getting an average of 80-100 clicks per day for the whole month. Not even a single day did the campaign spend close to $100.

However, on the last day of the month, all of a sudden I received 398 clicks! and a total spend of $200, with what appears to be junk traffic because none of them converted. I was getting consistent sales on the other days, but on the day when I received the most traffic, I only had 1 conversion when I was averaging around 3-4.

What does this mean? Do they send you bot traffic to spend your budget and match what they told you you were going to be charged for the month? I'm currently using Max CPC as my bidding strategy. If I switch to Target ROAS and give it a budget, will it force spend the budget while matching the desired ROAS?

That's not bot traffic, but they are known for being very liberal with their broad match type. The end of each month is also quite hectic for campaigns with unspent budgets.

Using Max CPC won't work well with broad keywords, and Target ROAS won't work unless you passed the value of each conversion back to Google.
tCPA (or Maximize Conversions with target CPA) is probably your best bet.

Either way, you should go over your search term and exclude keywords that indicate the wrong users.

Chris Newman · Apr 1, 2023

mikebro68 said:
What does this mean? Do they send you bot traffic

No, Google is not sending you junk traffic. You are in a niche where your competitors are sending you fraudulent clicks and about this, there is NOTHING you can do, except slightly reducing these fraudulant clicks, through some campaign related changes / tweaks. For more insights, see https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-bing-selling-fake-clicks.1447717/#post-15762387 , https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-to-prevent-fraud-click-from-competition.1333191/#post-14936213 and https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/defence-against-ad-bots.1484027/#post-16223553.
Another thing you possibly can do is analyse these fraudulent clicks, prepare a detailed report and submit it to Google Ads support and then pray that you get some credits for it.
And if these are not fraudulent clicks, then you need to seriously analyse your campaign setup, especially the keywords, geos targetted, etc.

mikebro68 · Apr 1, 2023

Trust WorkShop said:
No, Google is not sending you junk traffic. You are in a niche where your competitors are sending you fraudulent clicks and about this, there is NOTHING you can do, except slightly reducing these fraudulant clicks, through some campaign related changes / tweaks. For more insights, see https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-bing-selling-fake-clicks.1447717/#post-15762387 , https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-to-prevent-fraud-click-from-competition.1333191/#post-14936213 and https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/defence-against-ad-bots.1484027/#post-16223553.
Another thing you possibly can do is analyse these fraudulent clicks, prepare a detailed report and submit it to Google Ads support and then pray that you get some credits for it.
And if these are not fraudulent clicks, then you need to seriously analyse your campaign setup, especially the keywords, geos targetted, etc.

Hey, I'm not sure if that's the case here... If competitors were sending fraudulent traffic, why was I consistently getting around 80-100 clicks per day, and then suddenly on March 31st, I received 320 clicks?

I checked the daily spend and the amount billed to date, and Google was a little behind the estimated $2,105.96 cap they initially told me I would be billed for March... I ended up paying $200 for that campaign, even though my average daily cost was between $50-$80.

I don't know, it would be a lot of coincidence that they decided to send the fraudulent clicks just yesterday... I think it's Google entirely.

Chris Newman · Apr 1, 2023

mikebro68 said:
If competitors were sending fraudulent traffic, why was I consistently getting around 80-100 clicks per day, and then suddenly on March 31st, I received 320 clicks?

Seems like some of your competitor(s) are firing warning shots at you (those fraudulent clicks), so that you understand that you need to get out of their way. It costs them money to "spit out" their fraudulent clicks, so what they usually do is to suddenly fire warning shots and then lie low for a while, for them to see if you understand that you need to get out of their way. If they finally see that you have not understood, then they will fire bigger (bazooka) shots at you, to ensure that you are "out" of their way.
Sorry, it is now no longer a secret, that certain niches in Google Ads, are dominated by bad ass internet marketers (yeah !!! the ad whales).
Sorry to say, certain affiliate marketing niches in Google Ads, are nowaday dominated in the same way how street drug dealers dominate certain regions with certain of their products and they let no one else enter their territories (regions) especially not to sell the products they they sell there. But why ? Obviously, it is due to high profits and good money, in certain affiliate marketing niches (in Google Ads).
The sudden high clicks you got, are obviously them giving you a message as demonstrated in this video :-

tommydearest · Apr 1, 2023

I joined this site just to reply to your post. I Googled this exact scenario, well almost exact, because it just happened to me. We've been advertising for years. This campaign is a performance max campaign linked to our google merchant center products. For years, it averages about $50/day in clicks. On March 30 and 31, our charges were $280 and $350 respectively. We would've been ok had the traffic converted as it usually does. But, like you, it didn't. We had made no changes to anything in at least a month.

Royality22 · Apr 8, 2023

mikebro68 said:
Hey guys, I have a few questions regarding how Google manages your budget and the traffic they send...

So, when you set up a daily budget for a campaign in Google, they give you a cap for the month. For example, I recently switched my daily budget to $100/day for one campaign around March 20th and they said "in March, you won't be charged more than $2,100" or something...

The thing is, there is not a lot of search volume for the terms I'm targeting in this campaign, and I've been consistently getting an average of 80-100 clicks per day for the whole month. Not even a single day did the campaign spend close to $100.

However, on the last day of the month, all of a sudden I received 398 clicks! and a total spend of $200, with what appears to be junk traffic because none of them converted. I was getting consistent sales on the other days, but on the day when I received the most traffic, I only had 1 conversion when I was averaging around 3-4.

What does this mean? Do they send you bot traffic to spend your budget and match what they told you you were going to be charged for the month? I'm currently using Max CPC as my bidding strategy. If I switch to Target ROAS and give it a budget, will it force spend the budget while matching the desired ROAS?

As others already have mentioned seems like you got clickfrauded not much you can really do against it sadly

Campaign budget and Google sending junk traffic

mikebro68

Newbie

roydan

Elite Member

Chris Newman

BANNED

mikebro68

Newbie

Chris Newman

BANNED

tommydearest

Newbie

Royality22

Registered Member

Main Menu

Marketplace

Making Money

BlackHat World