Has anyone heard of people fraudulently clicking on competitors adword ads to raise their fees in order to drive them out of the market? I have a campaign where there was 50 clicks in a very short period of time with no sales. I suspect fraudulent activity. Has anyone heard of this? If so, is there any recourse? Thanks, Ather
If you think the clicks are fraudulent you can complain to google adwords so that they wont deduct the amount from your account.
Yea you really need to be vigilant about clickfraud because Google really doesn't do that much about it. Every now and then they might refund a little money to you because of invalid clicks but you'll never get an explanation or anything. Everything happens behind the scenes and we (the advertiser) are the ones at risk.
Ather, are you somewhat new to AdWords? Most of the time when people new to AdWords suspect "competitor click fraud" it's because they severely underestimated the amount of legit traffic out there, or, severely over estimated the conversion rates they expected from their landing page.
Each PPC search engine generally has a dedicated team of employees that are constantly watching for fraud in their system. However, that doesn't mean that every PPC search engine will catch every instance of click fraud. But watching the traffic to your website on a regular basis by reviewing your website statistics, you should be able to identify inconsistencies when they arise.