Today I placed a very popular keyword into one of my campaigns and put the bid in. 5-10 mins later it was online and I noticed, via StatCounter, that it got 6 clicks from the same IP address very quickly. Each click around 5-10 minutes apart. I didn't expect Google to detect the obvious click fraud but they did! About 2 hours later, the keyword had had 12 clicks - 8 being click fraud. I just recently checked todays stats again and the keyword has now had 4 clicks. Google must have automatically detected the fraud and removed the excess clicks. I've never actually noticed this so quickly (only when running reports), but it's nice to see! Has anybody else noticed this (apart from in reports)?
It's on Google Search, pipes. I've seen rebates given at the end of the week when my reports come through - but never actually been looking at my adgroup and noticed clicks & costs disappear.
That's probably the way it should be. Click fraud has kept me from spending $4-5 per click. However, I am still reluctant to overcome that old fear and don't place bids that high any more. PPC approach is innately flawed and is very prune for click fraud. PPA or PPS would be a much more desirable approach, but it's rather a fantasy dream today. I hope the one day a new set of folks will be able to set up such a formidable advertizing system on the web.
I havn't had as much luck with this, I normally have a conversion of about 1 per 20 clicks. Then in just one night i had 250 clicks and no conversions, there was almost 100% bounce rate aswell. i contacted adwords support and they just sent me a generic email, they havn't done anything about it. That was atleast a month ago.
If you mean Statcounter - it is free. The only time you need to pay is to increase your log count. If you export your data regularly, this increase isn't really needed.