Preventing Google AdWords Competitor Click Fraud

The security of Google AdWords advertisers is a top priority for Google, and Click Fraud is a growing concern for small business; with research showing a rise of click fraud by almost 20% in 2010.

Some competitors will deliberately generate and click on your ads repeatedly in an attempt to exhaust your daily budget sooner and bump up the costs of running your AdWords account; this is click fraud.

Certain patterns in your AdWords account can be observed to determine if you are experiencing this type of fraud, for example, you may notice a sudden and large increase in Impressions and Clicks for a keyword of high cost and competition.

There are ways to ensure that a competitor isn’t able to perform this fraud; which you can do yourself. Google AdWords account holders have the option to exclude up to 100 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from seeing Ads within their campaigns. All Ads in the campaign are prevented from being displayed for users with the IP addresses that you specify, so choose your list carefully.

An important note about IP address exclusion: Some large internet service providers (ISPs) use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address that is a proxy for many users, you could be blocking a large amount of legitimate and potentially profitable traffic. Google takes no responsibility for this action.

In saying all this, Google does have its own measures in place for preventing click fraud. Each click you get is examined by a system of theirs that looks at the IP address, time of click, any duplicate clicks and a few other click patterns. These factors are then analyzed by their system to isolate and filter out any patterns that appear to be deliberately driving up the costs of advertisers’ clicks/impressions.

If you are noticing some unusual activities in your Google AdWords account, and you suspect fraud, just bear in mind the following:

• Returned Visits: some users may legitimately click on your Ad more than once. For instance, they may be comparing products/services and have come back to your site for more information etc.
• Shared IPs: some Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as AOL, often assign the same IP address to multiple users. This means that you may be given the impression that you’ve received multiple clicks from a single visitor, when in fact, you haven’t.

If you feel you are experiencing click fraud, feel free to contact your Client Manager to discuss this further. Alternatively, if you would like a team at Google to investigate, please fill out this online form: http://www.adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?clickquality=1&ctx=clickqua

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