To All: I spend a significant amount of money on AdWords and sometimes overture. I closely monitor my traffic and clicks and I know for a fact that there is click fraud going on. It is time to do something about it as I would say it is 10-20% of my budget. Although I closely monitor my clicks I don't have a very good way of automatically reporting or identifying fraud. The fraud I know of is just plain obvious. I would like feedback from anyone out there that has used a software or service that supposedly monitors click fraud. I just did a quick search and there seems to be quite a few out there. (ClickDefense.com, Clickfraud.com, ClickDetective.com, etc......) I just don't want to use one that is a fraud in and of itself. I cant be the only one fed up with this problem and honestly Google has not been that helpful. Therefore I am interested in getting some amunition to submit to Google that some of these services claim they can provide.
Not sure how your stuff is set up, but you could do a send page on your site. Simple database with two tables: 1. keyword ID, keyword, landing page 2. keyword id, referrer, remote IP, provider, date/time stamp Drive all clicks to the send page with the keyword id. So in Google (and whatever other engines) your link looks like: www.MySite.com/goto.asp?kid=1234&p=g Goto.asp (or php or whatever) grabs the referrer, remote IP, the keyword ID (kid), and the provider (g=google, o=overture, etc) then date stamps the insert You can then build a query to look at clicks on the same keyword that comes from the provider and within a certain amount of time from each other. You can also run reports to show how many arrivals you had on your site to compare against how many sends the provider records. If you wanted to get really fancy, you can even feed back in sale or lead info from a confirmation page. If you want help to set up soemthing like this, PM me.