I was told to repost: ---------------------------------------------------------------- I look to the experts: Can my competitor, (in a very niche market) use a proxy site to click on my adwords ads to help his ad get better position - after my ads hit their daily quota, and get removed from display for the day - ?? My fear is rather than keep clicking from his IP, he is masking it behind proxy's/// any thoughts???
Sure they can. Google may or may not filter them as invalid. Watch your logs and report any suspicious activity.
But with soo many proxy sites out there, this is technically impossible to manage... they can hide behind a different one everyday.. unless google has a database of proxy sites (if this even makes sense, as I don't fully understand proxy sites)
What tools are available to me to help? When I look at stats on Cpanel, I get a listing of IPs.. that's it.
You'll have to get away from cpanel/awstats/webalizer to get any worthwhile data, Google Analytics is agood entry level package that provides decent data sets. Speaking in very broad terms, I basically build a profile of a site's "average" visitor then set flags (for investigation) when users activity falls outside of that norm. When I see those flags I do further investigation as take action on a case by case basis. You may find this interesting as well: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/meet-click-quality-team.html