Does anyone have any experience with tracking and reporting a competitor ... who repeatedly clicks on your PPC ad ... therefore draining your daily / weekly budget ...?? Is there a way to track this ... and has Google been responsive to dealing with this issue??
You can get a free visitor tracking tool at statcounter.com, which will help you sort traffic by IP address. You can also consider contacting Google directly if you see any unusual patters of the same person clicking on your ad after you have installed statcounter.
Thanks for the suggestion ... I will look into StatCounter ... sounds like a good suggestion ... Any "gotchas" or drawbacks with using this tracking tool ...??
I've been told by some that it slightly slows down the load time on the page, and have experienced a few times when the "invisible" actually showed. Also, it's a basic tracking tool. But overall I highly recommend it to my clients and find it to be very helpful. It actually has a "click path" much better than Google Analytics has, and you can literally watch which pages your viewers went to, and learn which pages are more effective, and the route they use. It's also FREE for a log count of up to 500 saved hits on your website. And if you want to come back and check regularly can be free in general. And it's ranked in the top 100 list (and even the top 20) of websites used in the US.
If you are a big spender in adwords and you see a lot of click fraud, you might consider using one of the professional click fraud companies.
Google detects click frauds and in my case, it was very fast in responding. Normally for a small budget advertisers, hiring professional services for detecting is not viable, you may do your cost benefits analysis. Moreover, it is not clear whether google will accept third party tracking reports. Do write Google; investigation at their end is assured
Thank you all for your input ... I will contact Google ... I just wanted to use some sort of third party tracking or click detection software in order to have actual numbers and facts for my case ... Of course the longer I wait ... the more fraud that occurs ... and the more my advertisting budget gets depleted ... sigh ...
click fraud is not as bad as you may think. The problem probably lies somewhere else (your campaign setup and strategy). Id bet money on it...
yeah, google refunds fraudulent clicks, they have to track it, otherwise no one would use their service.
Statcounter should be able to give you the information you need on that. I agree though. A lot of people advertise to get traffic to their websites, but don't get sales from the traffic they get. That's where hiring a good holistic internet marketing company comes in. To evaluate not only how to get you visitors, but how to help your website become effective in increasing your sales. We offer that and have helped businesses to successfully increase their revenue by up to nearly 400%. If you find after reviewing the information on Statcounter and speaking to Google, that you need a website evaluation and want me to help you out, PM me. I'm happy to help you.
Hmm ... while increasing revenues by 400% is a very enticing offer ... I really was asking more about trying to find possible fraudulent clicks and reporting them ... Thanks for the offer though ... I'll keep that in mind ...