I have seen one or two threads with people thinking they are being hit by their competition. Has anyone tried a product like http://www.geotekcs.co.uk/adtrack.html . If so do they work? Currently I run my weblogs regularly and use a good analysis package to look at all hits from Adwords. I do not see any evidence of fraud, but if these sort of packages make it a lot quicker to spot a problem developing it may be of value for me to splash out some cash. A secondary question is how good are Google at spotting fraud. I know they have given me credits before for multiple clicks on a couple of my ads - was i just lucky or are they usually pretty good at spotting the obvious?
Google claims they are on top of click fraud, but fail to give us webmasters the straight forward details on their tactics... Honestly, I don't think they are on top of it at all - and quite frankly, there is no true way to battle click fraud 100%. Yes they can detect excessive click fraud, but if your competitor clicks your ad once a day i'm sure nobody is going to refund you... I'm finding if you run adwords and you are in a very competitive market - you better offer the lowest prices out there, otherwise price shoppers are going to eat up your budget.
imo click fraud would be mitigate with extremely good aritifical intelligent algo and i am sure google has now enough data to write this algo
If they did, don't you think it would be easier to get around? I am sure click fraud is out there but letting everyone know what they look for wouldnt be the smartest move on there part.