Google Adsense Fraud

[arius]

Hi all,
There was some coverage of Google on National Public Radio in the Spring this year (2004) and one of the SEO experts related that he was losing money for his budget to advertise because his competitors were wasting his money by clicking on his Adsense ads intentionally with no intent to buy.

Google deducted funds from his account anyway. Has Google taken steps to protect Adsense clients from this kind of abuse?
Obviously this is a big deterrent to using PPC services if they can be easily abused by your competitors and at your expense.

Has this already been discussed?

Best regards

[GeXus]

Originally Posted by arius

Hi all,
There was some coverage of Google on National Public Radio in the Spring this year (2004) and one of the SEO experts related that he was losing money for his budget to advertise because his competitors were wasting his money by clicking on his Adsense ads intentionally with no intent to buy.

Google deducted funds from his account anyway. Has Google taken steps to protect Adsense clients from this kind of abuse?
Obviously this is a big deterrent to using PPC services if they can be easily abused by your competitors and at your expense.

Has this already been discussed?

Best regards

That sounds a little odd.. Google tracks all IPs and if there are multipul IPs, they will not count them.. or it would be easy for google to see that someone is clicking on it... Or if they are using proxies, again google will track that.. and refund the amounts.

Not sure who the SEO guy is.. but its posible that he said that so that less people will compete against him.. dunno

Also.. If he was using scripts to track the paths of visitors from his adsense campain.. it would be easy to show google that there were X amount of clicks to the main page.. and no where else..

[awall19]

Originally Posted by arius

Has Google taken steps to protect Adsense clients from this kind of abuse?

they have kicked members of this forum out of their program due to suspected click fraud. one of the biggest downsides to their program is that someone else can randomly click your stuff until you get rejected. they can remove you and refuse payment whenever they want to.

[arius]

Are you all saying that the burden of proof lies with the advertiser and not with Google? There is a saying that 50% of all money spent on advertising is wasted, the only problem is nobody knows which half. You could say that this is true for Adwords too if you have to second guess all the visits to your site and compare them to the click through paths.
I guess you need to be in a position to not really care how much of the traffic is honest and how much is fraudulent.

[awall19]

I am saying that an advertiser should be smart enough to design a profitable campaign and track it or they deserve to lose their money

there is tracking software which makes it much easier to find out what 50% is working.

adwords = direct marketers dream come true

[arius]

Here is an article that speaks more about this problem.
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=22173 (is it ok to post links to other forums? )
The article states that people are recruited into networks to click on competitor ads. The article even quotes a Google rep about the need to hand out refunds.

Awall19, can you list some of the services or products that let you manage your ppc campaign while protecting your self from fraud?
The article recommends one product.

I just don't think you can naively enter into this form of advertising.