http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6163023.html and digg.com/tech_news/Google_Acts_To_Stop_Click_Fraud_By_Your_Competitors
Here is another article on the subject: http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03/01/googlefraud/index.php
The thing I don't get is how you know your competitors IP address? Maybe you just blacklist the ones that click the most.
It will funny to see all the companies sitting back happy in the knowledge that their competitors have stopped advertising on Adwords when in reality they are just not seeing the ads. I never look at my logs so hopefully they will start with a list of suggested IP's to block.
Google could provide a list of people who have searched for your keywords on google and clicked on your ads an abnormal amount of times. These people could also have logged into another adwords account and been bidding on the same keywords.
Nah, won't happen. Google would never disclose that data (privacy) and the potential for problems & support related issues would be too high. In order to be at all effective the filtering will have to be done by the website owner.
Care to tell us how you spot IPs you want to black list? Also, do we have any idea how much click fraud happens from static IP addresses ( say the office your competitor works in, with a T1 or DS3 connection ) versus from a static IP? ( say a blog owner clicking away at the coffee shop over wifi? )
Imagine Company A and Company B are both bidding on "Blue Widgets". Now if company A logs in to their Adwords account from home, work, internet cafe and uses a few different IP addresses then Google should know that any clicks on ads by Company B from an IP address (or PC with a cookie) that is used by Company A are invalid. 90% of Adwords users won't track IP addresses like GuyfromChicago so I believe its up to Google to do it for you to a certain extent. They are probably already doing this in the click fraud algorithms.
What if the person at company A buys products from company B and company B doesn't use Google's conversion tracking so Google is unaware that a purchase was made? You want Google preventing buyers from seeing your ads just because of some IP/cookie related activity? There are a number (and it's a BIG number) of scenerios in which I see issues and I would be astonished if Google does anything related to blocking besides providing the tools and allowing advertisers to block things themselves. I'm wrong more often than I'm right though so I suppose we'll just have to wait and see Using customer data build a profile of a "good" click then exclude all historical IP's that fall outside of that range. Frequency & CPC/total spend plays a big role in this. It's probably a bit more reactive than proactive but if it's a quick setup and potentially saves a few $'s here and there than it's worth it IMO. Heck, with a little effort one could probably even automate the whole process.
How do they know who their competitor is. While they can tell the ip of a competitor doing business with Google, the exec can still see it from his home computer
That sounds quite complicated for people like me with little or no programming experience. I think there would be a market for someone selling a script like that. BTW, a useful proactive measure might be banning all IPs of Tor servers, as they are often used by people who want to hide their IP address.
Click fraud is a fiasco. Hard to think of the fact that people are still doing click-fraud these days. 3 years back I had a major PPC campaign in Google and Yahoo, we're talking about $4000 in average weekly spent that eventually was on an average-to-minus ROI because of clickfraud. All PPC search marketing companies are NOT doing enough to prevent this because its a kind of complex. They make thousands from click fraud, claim to fight it, and never do enough. (And rarely they lose advertisers). If google spots 3 ad clicks from a competitor IP-address they should ban this user, including his/she's credit card pin, domains, and what ever they can, and we all know they collect ENOUGH information. Yet its a complex, they generate descent income. The only solution might be legal actions and making CF completely Illegal (Like spam). People will still do it, but much less. This feature is just a marketing strategy that was introduced order to collect on more advertisers. (That was supposed to be available long time before this thread).