Hi

We have been using Google Adwords for a while. The costs/clicks are now quite stable on a daily basis.

Last Wednesday, the daily cost doubled. The number of clicks nearly doubled, our CTR was up 50% and our CPC was also higher.

However, the conversions were not higher. We did not have any more sales than usual or calls.

The initial reason from Google was that this was a technical error and ads in some ad groups had not been authorised even though they had been in there for months. They are now saying that the industry as a whole had more traffic. I have checked with companies and they have not seen the same spike.

Some ad groups were costing over 1000% more than the day before.

Is there anything else I can check? Surely it's not right.

I've not checked our log files yet. Can anyone recommend anything to check logs with. I always have problems with our logs, they are over 1gb a day. Does this sound too big? I don't know where to start at analysing my logs.

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks
Peor

The same day we saw a 400% increase in clicks in 3 specific campaigns within content match - No conversions.

Oddly the average cost per click was very small like .06

So although we recieved thousands of clicks it only cost us a little over $100.

I have reported it and my G rep is researching the issue.

The $100 bones is in the noise, what hurts is that we had to turn these campaigns off, for fear of that .05 cent click jumping to our max bid. This impacts our volume for this week.

Contact your rep - Discovery

Seems to be getting more widespread. My personal experience, is a significant increase in clickthroughs over the last couple of weeks, with little change in conversions. This seemed to be mainly on our more relevant terms.

I have added some live tracking into the website, in order to determine If i can see a pattern. Only time will tell

Hi

We have been using Google Adwords for a while. The costs/clicks are now quite stable on a daily basis.

Last Wednesday, the daily cost doubled. The number of clicks nearly doubled, our CTR was up 50% and our CPC was also higher.

However, the conversions were not higher. We did not have any more sales than usual or calls.

The initial reason from Google was that this was a technical error and ads in some ad groups had not been authorised even though they had been in there for months. They are now saying that the industry as a whole had more traffic. I have checked with companies and they have not seen the same spike.

Some ad groups were costing over 1000% more than the day before.

Is there anything else I can check? Surely it's not right.

I've not checked our log files yet. Can anyone recommend anything to check logs with. I always have problems with our logs, they are over 1gb a day. Does this sound too big? I don't know where to start at analysing my logs.

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks
Peor

We have seen this on occasion for certain keywords but never ad groups. In all cases things settled down within a few days and things resumed as per normal. We also asked our Google rep about this and got the same answer as you did; I think this is Google-speak for "we don't know." At any rate the AdWord reps rarely know much about the technical stuff and constantly have to e-mail engineering.

Hi Guys

Thanks for the replies. Sorry for the delayed response. Had a few days off due to our Bank Holiday here.

I've had a reply from Google. They don't see anything wrong with the clicks that came through. What a surprise! But what am I suppose to do now? That one day alone costed us a lot and it went on for a few days after. How can there not be any strange activity. Everything doubled. None of our competitors experienced the same!

Any ideas on what our response to Google should be? Should we be checking anything?

Thanks

PEOR,

I think the best you can do is document and persist with your request for a review/refund.

Pull your log files and quantify the clicks for the time period you want to reveiw.
IP Addresses of the clicks
time stamps
referring sites
Keywords
and so on.

If you are using a 3rd party tracking system, or even googles Google Analytics then pull the conversion results together for that time period as well.

Compare what had occured on that day to what your history has been to show Google that something more than a rush of "unqualified" clicks was at work here.

Also demonstrating that there was little or no change to your ad campaigns(keywords, CPC bids, Budget, ads, landing pages) will also help show that there was no logical reason for the sudden increase in traffic.

And if you dont have robust, near real time tracking, for every aspect of your marketing campaigns on Google and all the SEs then this is your warning to pull it together pronto.

We have a very robust system in place and we still get burned from time to time, but we never get burned for more than a few hours. I'm not chiding you here, just want to make a clear point that if your current system is allowing a few days of click fraud to occur without detection then your company is operating under an unacceptable risk level.

Discovery

Yep, same thing here.

CTR more than doubled (a fair sign of click fraud). Spending increased by 40%.

Interesting thing is that when I looked at the log file and each visit, they looked legitimate. No bounce rate problems, multiple page views, regular time spent on site. Very interesting.

If you are not at the top of the listings and even sometime then as well - your listings are rotated through so possibly a couple of your competitors dropped out and you got the extra traffic.... lame at best as I believe there has been some push of new click fraud technology lately... too many people making the same claim in a lot of different places.

About 6 weeks ago one of my industry core keywords went crazy. So what usually averaged a CTR of 4% jumped up to over 14% with no significant change in impressions or position change. There was also a significant decrease in the conversion of this word. I contacted my google rep and explained my concern.

Basically all of the increase was coming from one of google search partners. I have had this partner removed from my campaign.

I would not be surprised if this is causing your problems as well.

The partner that caused this mainly does domain parking.

About 6 weeks ago one of my industry core keywords went crazy. So what usually averaged a CTR of 4% jumped up to over 14% with no significant change in impressions or position change. There was also a significant decrease in the conversion of this word. I contacted my google rep and explained my concern.

Basically all of the increase was coming from one of google search partners. I have had this partner removed from my campaign.

I would not be surprised if this is causing your problems as well.

The partner that caused this mainly does domain parking.

Yeah a friend of mine calls this arbitrash!

I'll try and look into it more. Even if I can show that conversions did not increase I don't think I will get anything Google. I will try analysing the logs as well. Thanks.