I got a small spike in traffic today, usually it's about 1 or 2 hits a day and less on a friday afternoon but I got 6 in a few hours and no calls or emails which is what the landing page is all set up to generate. The ad even has a phone number and the landing page has a number or contact us for more info. Anyway I have a hunch that these aren't all genuine, how do I go about notifying Google and has anyone got a sample of what information I need to send google to get them to have a look?
The fact that nobody e-mailed or phoned doesn't mean anything - do you e-mail/phone every site you look at?
Anomalous spikes are common. User behaviour is never set in stone. You have nothing to worry about unless it continues to occur. Contacting Google for so small a spike will be just a waste of time.
No but there's a few factors that make me think these are either competitor hits or casual clicks particularly the short period of time they occured in, the day when traffic is very very slow, my usual traffic, and the call to phone on the ad and the landing page and other things. I agree it would be a waste of time though but they were top dollar clicks as it's a competitive market. I haven't got access to log files, anyone know how I could test the ip's, the page visit times etc?
Hi Guys, I'm looking at my LiveStats information for the period in question and it shows that yesterday between 1 and 6 in the afternoon there was four 1 sec visits a two sec visit and a four sec visit. These are well below some of the average time spent such as 50 secs. I don't think there's any doubt that these or atleast the 1 secs are casual if not fraudulent clicks. I find Google Analytics slightly hard to use to gather and isolate all the information relating to google adwords.. Does anyone have a better suggestion of how to track possible fraudulent clicks?
4 clicks in a 5 hour period isn't really enough to cry foul. I do see your point if these are very expensive keywords, but I don't know what you mean by 'casual' clicks - people are allowed to click on an ad, not like what they see, and leave straight away. And come back a few times. I've just had a customer who has been visiting my site about 20 times a day for the last week - eventually they bought something. But they don't always buy.
I just got hold of a log file. The same IP address came through Google for the term 'graphic design' 3 times in 30 minutes. I've used broad match for 'web design' so I guess Google reckons that this is what the searcher was looking for. I think there's a big difference! The gclid is different for each visit, even when the 2nd and 3rd visit are 2 mins apart.