My Experience With Click Fraud

Ive been running a huge ppc campaign in a niche where the cpc is often $90. About a week ago my site was hit with a 30% CTR all coming from one keyword... The total cost was $2500 in a single day. Whoever was clicking on my ad didn't stop until the daily budget was exhausted. I have never had a ctr over 10% after running this campaign for over a year. Fast forward to today after talking with the adwords team for over a week they determined that a 30 percent ctr on one keyword is not click fraud and i am not entitled to a refund. its such bullshit that they get away with this.

Nothing stopped someone from blowing my budget and adwords wouldn't even acknowledge the obvious. I feel like i should just do the same to my competition since adwords doesn't want to acknowledge the click fraud.

Has anyone had experience with clickcease or similar products that could protect me? I would love some input.

Do you have the logs from your site? It can help you prove your point to adwords (samp IPs, many clicks within the same time frame, etc.).
Also, there are tools like Clickcease that can help you prevent this thing from happening again by excuding the IPs automatically. I've heard that they can also give you some reports to help you with the AdWords claim.

**I don't work with Clickcease yet, but I plan to start soon. Also, I'm not associated with them.

Oh dear this sounds familiar...I've also had a close experience to what you are describing. A competitor of mine basically sat on my ads and "clicked me dry". I've wasted thousands of euros on fraud because of him and Google was "kind" enough to tag some of those clicks as invalid but basically did not refund me AT ALL... claiming that "this activity fits the pattern of normal user behaviour" bullshit...
As for your other question, due to the fraud situation I was having, I tried many fraud blocking services. The one that stood out the most was clickcease. They offer a very good service that allowed me to identify and block my competitors who were using some form of VPN to hide their IPs and regularly change it. Highly advised.

*I am not affiliated with them either, but they do deserve the shout out.

Another thing you might want to try is to create a remarketing list with a window of 1 or 2 days and exclude them from all of your campaigns.
That can help you preventing a user to click of your ad more than once per day (only if you have enough traffic, you need at least 100-200 users to use a remarketing list).

that's pretty cut throat of your competitors to be doing that. karma will get them.

Honestly this kind of thing could be really hard to prove. Plenty of sources of residential proxies and a little randomisation it's really hard to catch on to. Immoral, fraudulent but part of the game I'm afraid.

Scroogefrog said:

Hello! You can try to use ScroogeFrog service. It costs 0,005 per click. And have autoban features.

Click to expand...

Reported for advertising.

Thanks so much for this thread. I don't even advertise on Adwords because my ads get eaten up so fast by competitors. It's super fucked up, but they have lots of money. I'm looking into clickcease right now and gonna fuck the competitors.

we use clickcease, it's pretty automated and stopped by our local comp. some of our keywords go for $120-220 manual cpc.

google adwords will only help so much with their invalid clicks filter

I have the same problem. My competitors made bot clicks which I even can't see in my analytics because they stop redirects after the first one. So it is impossible to detect IPs of such clicks. Any ideas?

AckAck said:

we use clickcease, it's pretty automated and stopped by our local comp. some of our keywords go for $120-220 manual cpc.

google adwords will only help so much with their invalid clicks filter

Click to expand...

eliasdigger said:

I have the same problem. My competitors made bot clicks which I even can't see in my analytics because they stop redirects after the first one. So it is impossible to detect IPs of such clicks. Any ideas?

Click to expand...

The quoted post seems like an ideal option for you, please look into it.

Please also note the rules because click fraud discussion is not allowed here.

I can relate with your issue, big time. I have been suffering from adwords click fraud almost since day 1 advertising with Google... the competitors are too fierce and malicious!!!
I tried everything - monitored the IP's, changed the geo targeting, tried many keywords combinations (i'm quite limited here tho, can't play much with this), even changed device targeting. I would like to mention my website is online casino niche so you can imagine how high my CPC is =\

I tried clickcease like few already mentioned here, but they provided very limited solution and help to be honest so I had to look after other solutions and finally found one called 'Adtector'. They are more expensive which is sucks, but they indeed provided a better click fraud protection and almost completely eliminated my click fraud issues (they blocked tons of IP's everyday with their algo).

I'm not associate with them in any form or shape but you might want to check them out. I'm still using them btw