I posted this on another thread and was surprised that no one replied (so I thought I'd create a new thread about it)... ... While we all want to see if (and when) our new Google Adwords' ads are running, doing so might get us in trouble with impression fraud. Impression fruad is the deliberate act of searching for a competitor's ads over and over again to dilute their clickthru rate (and possibly triggering a Quality Score penalty). Of course, checking to see how our new ads look is certainly not a deliberate act of impression fraud, but I say why take the chance? That's why you should see how your ads look at this just-released Google Ad Preview site: http://www.google.com/m/search?mres...adtestmarkup=xhtml&adtestcarrier=us-all&hl=en Pretty nifty, eh?
Yes... that's true. I prefer to use it because it's more comprehensive than the first-generation Ad Preview Lookup Tool of: http://www.google.com/adpreview Both version are pretty cool, eh?
I try not to worry about this too much because I feel that it goes both ways. I sometimes look up my keywords, as well as competitors looking up same keywords. We equally dilute our CTR. Would I rather it not happen? Sure, but there's too much other stuff to worry about... But great information, in any case, thanks.
is impression fraud really a problem? I know I look up my own keywords (not too often) to check out my competition. I'm sure they do the same...
I personally believe impression fraud to be the greatest threat to PPC advertisers out there. While click fraud can be detected by comparing statistical data and looking for variations in amounts of clicks, impression fraud is much more difficult to detect. To put it simply, searches tend to change in volume in case of special events. For example the amount of searches for the keyword Britney Spears skyrocketed after she shaved her head. On the other hand, I can’t see a situation that an ad would be clicked on significantly more as a result of a significant even. Therefore, what a particularly malicious competitor could do is create a robot that searches their top search terms when they don't appear (by using scheduling), which in turn will decrease the quality score of their competitors. Theoretically, this could be done in a sophisticated way which would make it undetectable by both google and advertisers. Resulting in a low QS for all other advertisers but themselves.
Nah. In theory it could be (in theory what couldn't be???) but I've never seen any evidence to support that it's an issue of any significance at the present time.
I've never heard anything so rediculous in my life. Doing one or two searches will not affect a KWs CTR, unless its a low volume KW and in which case there will either be a low number of compeitors or you probably don't care about that KW!
The theoretical issue isn't one or two queries...it's hundreds/thousands via automation over a period time.