Hi there, I have noticed that one particular visitor arrives at my site a few times a day via AOL. Everytime he clicks on my add. He is creative and comes up with a new search term every time. This has been going on for at least a week. Apart from trying to get some money back from google is there anything else I can do? (Maybe I could have a pop up with a fist showing for this particular IP number, just kidding). Thanks. Tillies
It would be a perfect world if every ppc we got was relevant/resulted in a sale! How much is this guy costing you? Is it worth your time try to get him *not* to click on your ad's?
I will have to check on how much this is costing me everyday (probably $1.00 a day). Just don't know how long this person will hang in there doing this and what he/she is really after. I just noticed it because it is the same IP and every time a different search term (e.g 1) Teddybear, 2) Teddy Bear Wallpaper 3) Jesus loves me Teddy bear, etc. The person leaves after seing the landing page or the next page.Weird..... Just wondered if somebody knows of any technological solution I could apply.
I have found what code I will have to put into the .htaccess file to block the IP. I will try this out. Thanks for the help. However, the idea a re-directing and a pop up is soo apealing. It just gets my imagination going, I can see the animation and sound effects in my mind. But there is not enough time for fun things like that. Monica
I know a guy who did a redirect on someone as a joke and it was very funny. This guy kept getting on the Internet at work to check on NFL football. One special day everytime he tried to check on the games he was redirected to an adult site. He had to explain on more than one occassion why he was checking out adult sites on the company computer. It was funny.
I THOUGHT I saw similar behavior as well. I did some google searches on the IP's and discovered that they were AOL dial-up IP's or AOL Caching Server entries. While I'm pretty positive a good portion of the traffic was somebody clicking on my adwords ads on their website, google did a good job of not charging me. Comparing my daily clicks/expenses with what I saw from this particular problem I discovered that most of the clicks weren't charged against my account. It either means that I was right, and one guy was trying to run up my bill, or that adwords doesn't charge you for most of your AOL click-throughs. Either way, I was happy.
Google did charge me. I even wrote to them and sent them reports which they totally ignored. I got a very very arrogant response. They need more competition!!! I also wrote to AOL and for a about two weeks the clickers disappeared. Don't know if it was coincidence, as they are back every day and building more of these sites. Unfortunately you cannot block out ip numbers in adwords.
The problem with this as I see it is that AOL users usually come in via a proxy, so the IP is not unique. You will be sending everyone that comes in through that proxy to the fist
This is the problem with the PPC companies - you can get clicked every single day by the same person on the same computer and you will almost always get charged. When you do show proof they give a hard time about refunds. $1 clicks is bad enough, but imagine the people with $10 keywords who have 2 or 3 competitors clicking once per day. Click fraud is only going to get bigger and bigger. There are software solutions that will help you determine if it is exactly the same person every time - a bit easier than going through your log files. Some even do let you send a message to the "serial clickers" telling them to cut it out. Depending on how much you spend on PPC every month this may or may not be worth it. not sure if this is against the TOS, if it is and gets edited pm me and I'll send you some names: whosclickingwho clicklab clickrisk or just google "click fraud"