AdWords Advertisers - Have You Received A Refund?

I've been running this poll on one of my sites for quite a while now, so I thought I'd see what the DP members had experienced.

When an AdSense publisher gets banned for invalid clicks, they (AdSense) promise that all that publisher's earnings will be returned to the affected advertisers. The actual text they use is:

"Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in AdSense and do not receive any further payment. The earnings on your account will be properly returned to the affected advertisers."

Considering that quite a lot of publishers get banned, some of them with very high AdSense earnings, I'm interested to know if any AdWords advertiser has actually received a refund? On the balance of probability I think that nearly all AdWords advertisers should have received a refund at some time. Of course we only have Google's word that they are actually performing these refunds.

 

Never seen any in my reports.

 

Just to give you an idea, I ran stats for a few of my campaigns and Google's invalid click rate (out of around 5000 clicks) was almost 6%... and that's NOT using the content network at all, just plain old search & search network. Google does refund advertisers for invalid clicks.

 

One of our clients in the automotive industry. Yes, refunds are made for click 'quality' - they are however a very small figure compared to this clients media spend.

 

It always is just a few cents..

 

You might want to review whether to opt out of the search network following some recent discussion over at Marketing Pilgrim - seems that the search network isn't as trustworthy as you might imagine.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/google-domain-parking-arbitrage.html

 

I wouldn't say that..

From another client account, over the course of 2 months

I think that Google's click fraud tracking is better than a lot of people would have you believe (Especially companies selling expensive click fraud tracking software), but obviously isn't perfect.

 

This is sounding promising - maybe Google do handle refunds efficiently.

 

I am an adwords advertiser and after 4 months and about $3,800 in ad fees, I have yet to see a "refund" of any type.

 

What niche are you in? Bear in mind that most invalid clicks are filtered out by Google before they hit your account balance - it's only retrospective refunds that will show up in your account history.

If you're in a less competitive market, it stands to reason that there will be less click fraud.

I heard a statistic from somewhere (sorry, can't remember source) that about 74 % of click fraud is confined within the financial services sector.

 

Not in the financial industry so hopefully I'm ok.

I would love to see G's internal reports on the actual clicks.
Talk about having faith in the system.