hi all. I've used adwords on a small scale for ages, with cheap keywords. Last month started experimenting with the standard "work from home" advertising. Only 4 or so keywords - work from home, work at home, home business etc. Obviously it's competitive. Getting towards $2/click for page 1. Bascially all my traffic is coming from adwords. And people are going all the way through to the last page, for the contact page and entering their details. Horrible obscene spam, with links to obscene sites. I do server side validation to make sure they enter a valid email address for followup. I have a few text fields, for name and contents. That's where they are putting the obscene stuff. Sooo, I don't like paying to be abused. I asked Google if they can prevent it. They suggest banning IP addresses. I already restrict it geographically to my state (NSW, Australia). A few minutes ago I decided to further restrict it to exclude Google partners, and specific times of the day. I coded the page in PHP to simply send me an email when someone fills in my contact page. So I have the timestamp of the email. I wasn't doing any other logging. I there any specific information I could use to track where the spam is coming from. They typically enter a russian email address, eg clingo44@ya.ru. (Interesting when you google that email address - they obviously do a lot of comment spam across a lot of site). I guess I should log IP address. Is there a way of testing/proving whether it is a robot entering the details? In a perfect world, this would show Google that they are not delivering targetted traffic that I am paying for, but that I am paying to be spammed. And they would refund the clicks. Any tips? It's getting pretty expensive paying for abuse.
I'm also using Google analytics. But as far as I can see, it doesnt report down to time of day. Either does AdWords. So I can't match up particular clicks to the timestamp on my emails. Love to hear suggestions to stop wasting money this way.