Hi Guys, I am seeking anyone with advice or expertise in dealing with this. We are a small internet business (retail) that relies on Adwords for our sales. We sell 100% of our products online, 75% coming from PPC, 25% from Organics/repeat customers. We have been paying about $1.75-$2.00 per click per visit for our adwords for the last 12 months with an average of $20000 spent with Google per month. Recently we made an update to our backend that allows us to look at users browsing our page real time and the referring keyword/site they came from. I decided one day a month ago to just look at it for a while. To my surprise, I saw that we have had a lot of strange IPs from overseas that pops up in spurts once in a while, from Taiwan, Portugal, Brazil, UK, etc, usually 60-120 seconds apart, and always a different IP, clicking on one of our most expensive ($2.40+) keywords. These IPs never browse any pages, and just simply click and disappear. It happens usually about once every 2-3 hours, for 15-30 clicks at a time. I brought this up with Google on May 31 reporting via their Invalid Clicks link for period May 31 to May 31 (24 hr period) and within the same day we saw a credit back from "Click Quality" for $213. "May 31 Adjustment - Click Quality 213.09" They never responded via email regarding this to me, and I had to call 866-2GOOGLE the next day to find out that they did indeed credit me $213 for the invalid clicks for May 31. Starting May 31 I have been watching my backend like a hawk, only to notice that every day, we seem to get about 100-200 "clicks" from Taiwanese, UK, Portrugal, Brazilian, UK ips. Our campaign is marked to only advertise in United States and Canada and no where else. I have opened 2 separate tickets to Google for retroactive credit of invalid clicks from Period May 14-31 and on June 5 I opened a ticket for Invalid Clicks for June 1 to June 5. On June 7 I received an email from "Ravi" Google Click Quality team who stated that Google does not see any invalid clicks for our adwords account and there will be no credits issued retroactively nor going forward. I replied back with log server files showing the following: Many examples of days where we received say 25 clicks for [Keyword A] on our Google bill and our web server IP log shows 25 clicks for that keyword, with 4 actually from the United States, and 21 from Portugal, Brazil, China, UK, Taiwan, all 21 of which are unique IPs but came within 30 minutes window, and never clicked beyond my homepage. Every day we would have 2-3 examples of this and Google simply charges us for them. I got a response from Ravi the next day stating that google again, does not see any invalid impressions and for us to "Trust" Google that they are vigorously monitoring our adwords account for invalid clicks. Since then, i have opened numerous new cases (with full logs, showing we were billed for X clicks and 70+% of those X clicks came from overseas in short spurts of 30 minutes or less each day), but have received absolutely no responses from "Ravi" nor the click quality team. The most recent response I have received from them was in the form of another Click Quality adjustment on my Google bill: "Jun 13 Adjustment - Click Quality 1.94" On June 13, I counted over 120 clicks from those same overseas countries with all of those clicks resulting in no additional page loads or conversions and all clicking via 4 of our advertised 1000 keywords (and the 4 most expensive one as well). I also validated that we were indeed billed for them and provided the logs showing we had nearly no US clicks for those keywords. Yet all I got from Google was a credit back for $1.94 for over $240 of fraud for that day alone. Words cant really describe how frustrated and angry I am about this. The clicks are eating up our bottom line and I can't get Google to stop it. Because the clicks always come from a fresh new DHCP IP overseas it seems, we can't proactively use the IP Block List on adwords to block them. ANd every keyword we have removed, the clickers simply find a new one to click us on. I have provided so much data that simply prooved beyond a reasonable doubt to Google that there were indeed invalid clicks happening every day and clicks that i can see happening everyday, yet I don't get any type of response back nor credit back. What am I suppose to do at this point? I really feel google is holding me hostage because I can't drop adwords (i would lose 75% of my new customer sales). I can't file a complaint with my credit card company because I fear that google will just terminate my adwords account. I literally am stuck. If any of you are in a similar situation or have dealt with something similar please let me know. Thanks, Jordan
Well you have all the proof you need, and i would continue to log your proof. what i would do is constantly contact them about this matter like you are doing. Also how long have you been with adwords? You are saying that around 70% of the clicks are fraudulent. your looking at $14,000 a month in fraud. Say you have been with google for 10 months that's $140,000 in loss due to fraud not being prevented nor stopped by google. Now it looks like you don't want to end your relationship with google so i would contact them saying that you are ready to go fourth with a lawsuit if it is not corrected. Keep in mind they may still ignore you. But you will get their attention when they are served with the lawsuit. Also i would try other networks like microsoft and yahoo.