Have you ever had suspicious clicks on your Google Adwords adverts? Have you seen a huge increase in your advertising spend with no noticable difference in sales activity? Perhaps a competitor is clicking on your advert multiple times. The Google Adwords team have impressed with their investigation and actions, as seen below:
[Google] I believe you called us in earlier for an update but our investigation team have not gotten back to me yet. I wanted to send you an email just to let you know we will be out of office until Tuesday so if you do not hear from me again by 6pm it will be Tuesday.
I noticed in your emails that you said you or your web developers are unable to get the weblogs to see the IP addresses who click on your ads so there is one thing I can suggest for you.
This would not be a tool that we support ourselves but you could download a free IP tracker for your site. I would not know of any particular ones but if you do a search on Google for one I’m sure you will find one.
This will show what IP addresses are going to your site and if you see a repeat one which you probably will considering the amount of invalid clicks you receive you can exclude it from seeing your ads. This is the only alternative I can think of for you if you definitely can not get web logs.
Then you should excluding IP’s once you have them
This is all I can give you for now until I get something back from our team.
When we investigated your account, we noticed clicks and impressions that did not fit a profile of normal user behaviour. We verified that our monitoring software has already proactively filtered out some of this activity, and we confirmed that you weren’t charged for clicks that were automatically filtered.
In addition, we’ve applied a credit to your account in the amount of 90 USD (approx 65 pounds) for potentially invalid clicks that weren’t automatically filtered from your reports. This credit will be applied to your account in the next 4 to 6 weeks and will be visible on your billing “Transaction history” page. Please note that this amount is approximate, and it is possible that the amount that will be credited to your account will be different. Common reasons for this include overlapping credits that were issued to your account, or changes to our filtering which may reduce the amount that you are billed. Rest assured that you were not charged for the invalid clicks and impressions, since those charges were reimbursed to you either through account credits or by billing adjustments.
We’re constantly working to improve our detection mechanisms to proactively combat invalid click activity. Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention, and we apologise for any inconvenience.
As I have suggested before, I do think you should get your weblogs from your web developer or getting an IP tracker to see if there is a single IP address clicking on your ads all of the time and once you block this it will stop showing the ad to that person. This could be the case considering you were given over 250 pounds this month for invalid activity so I would expect it to be the same IP address. If you can not block this then it is very likely that this can continue to happen.
If you do have any other questions please do not hesitate to contact us again!
I have contacted our investigation team for you this morning regarding your issue. They are still investigating this for you and I am just sending you an email to keep you updated on this.
These investigations can take up to 7 working days to complete so I will keep you posted on this and will get in contact as soon as I hear back from them.
