Hello All! New here, just found the forum and have a question. I have an adwords campaign, been running it for nearly a year. I have a 'landing page' for my Google adwords only. That is, no one else should directly go to that page unless they are coming from a click on my ads. There are no links to it, it has a long cryptic title, etc... I have a function that captures the IP and search criteria entered to hit my landing page, so I can see where most of my traffic is coming from. Every other day, I noticed the same couple of IPs hitting my site (and counting as clicks and therefore $$$ charged to me). These IPs are Google IPs. What is going on here? Is Google running bots that click on my ads and therefore charge me money??
Google doesn't click on your ads so that they can make money. That would be fraud. But the Google Bot does go on your site. It determines your quality score and crap like that.
I realize that would be fraud, and I do see lots of visits from the Google bots on all of my website pages. The issue I have seen the last few days is my stats page shows a click on my ad (first of the day) and at the same date/time I see an entry in my DB with the Google IP and only that entry. I would expect an extra entry (or entries) for the Google bots. For example I might get 2 clicks one day and I will see two entries, they always match 1-1. Only sometimes the entry is a Google IP, which seems strange. I suppose it is possible that for some reason I am missing the recording of an actual IP click. Hope my explanation makes sense.
Probably a bot checking on your page. I believe too that some clicks may appear to come from Google, especially those coming from the display network.
If G did that and got caught, it would be game over for sure. Fraud is a huge issue so I'm sure that G keeps very detailed records on clicks and their origination. If you are capturing the referrer IP, I think it would be a Google owned address if the user clicked an ad on Google search results pages. After all, the page is a Google page. Non-google referrers would be content network displays. (I don't run my ads on the content network. Altough G does the best job out there to overcome fraud, there's still too much for my liking.)