Everyone tells you top block "suspect" IPs to help fight click fraud, but no-one has ever said how to actually identify one. Recently my AdWords campaign just stopped delivering conversions. Usually I would get around 20 conversions a month at around $12 per conversion. Then this jumped to $50 per conversion, and now it's stopped delivering any (although the number of visitors remains the same) I haven't changed the ads, or keywords or anything else, so I paused my campaign and looked to find if I was being the victim of click fraud. I use AW-Stats, and reviewed the logs of the IPs which have a very high rate of clicks. But in all honesty I have no idea what to look for. I have around 4 with over 500 pages viewed that when I've looked up the IP they are from a Google server. So what should I look for to find IPs of fraudulent clickers?
Look for multiple clicks from one ip. Google Adwords will refund clicks if you can produce proof with your logs and if they missed it in the first place. Ive had colleagues get refunds this year.
Here's some examples of my IP list log. I've replaced the last few numbers with #'s to keep people's identity hidden. Each of my pages has many hits so I would expect a user to have at least 20 hits per page. IP Pages Hits Bandwidth Last Visit 1) 209.##.###.### 495 495 241.64 KB 21 Aug 2007 - 20:45 2) 208.##.###.### 308 338 15.74 MB 03 Aug 2007 - 05:21 3) 66.###.###.### 270 686 131.99 KB 22 Aug 2007 - 18:35 4) 86.###.###.### 241 5569 18.40 MB 13 Aug 2007 - 17:55 1) this is Google... so I presume from the low hit to page ratio, it's Googlebot... 2) This is somewhere in Seattle. The low hits compared to the pages looks strange, and they've downloaded a lot of stuff, particularly when you consider they aren't supposed to be waiting for a page to fully load. Last visit was 3 weeks ago, so all the traffic was in 1 or 2 days. Any idea what this could be? 3) IP search brings up "Burning Door INAP-CHG-BURNINGDOOR" what on Earth is this? Similar results to the Google one i.e. low bandwidth use, and low hit/page ratio. 4) This looks like a real user. Problem is, who would look at so many pages? I haven't got that many pages of information, and had no customers from the Netherlands (where the IP was from) this month. Like I said, I really don;t know what to look for. How can you tell if the clicks are from Adwords or from another source? Thanks
Ip's 2,3 & 4 are very high hits for one person. Why not send this data to your Adwords rep as suspected click fraud and let them check too. And see what their reply is. Ive done that before. Just maintain a "poker face" and claim they are click fraud and let Google approve or disapprove that claim for you.
You can use a PPC tracking service like www.adlogger.com or www.clickaider.com I have tried both these service and looks good adlogger stopped their service but still their old version is available.. but it was not working for me anyway give a try if its not working for you also then switch to clickaider...