amc1978
05-24-2006, 05:42 PM
My Company is deciding whether or not to stake a claim in the Google settlement since we have several very large search accounts on that engine. We are attempting to estimate the dollar amount owed to us, in order to decide what course of action to take. Does anyone have a good idea of how to estimate the dollar amount? What %age of clicks is most commonly attributed to be fraudulant? I know that contextual ads generally have more fraud than regular search campaigns, does anyone know by how much?
kmadd
05-24-2006, 07:56 PM
Concerning you question, I'd say that it is safe to assume that 2-3% of your clicks are junk in a semi-competitive industry, in a very competitive industry 6-7% crap is reasonable. Of course none of this matters because you get paid based on what you spent on AdWords relative to what was spent by all other claimants, not what you estimate your bogus clicks were.
Besides the claim asks what you "believe" your percentage of fraudulent clicks is. Which is comical because I have some very paranoid clients who believe that all clicks that don't convert are ex-employees, ex-marketing companies and competition trying to sabotage them. Any MSM mention of click fraud upsets me because that means that I'm going to be combing through log files again.
You probally wont get much from the settlement though...
From the settlement document that advertisers recently received...
"To receive credits, you must submit a valid and timely claim form. Credits will be awarded on a pro rata basis, taking into account the amount that you paid to Google for the ads and the total amount of credits available. For example, if the amounts that you paid to Google for the affected ads were 1% of Google’s revenues from online advertising since January 1, 2002, you would be eligible to receive 1% of the total available credits. You must certify in your claim form the percentage of your ads you believe were affected by “click fraud”."
Lets say half of all advertisers submit valid claims (very generous):
2002-Q1 2006 Google AdWords earnings: $11.3 billion (link (http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html))
So if you spent $1,000,000 on ads over that time frame you would account for 1/5650 of Google's AdWords revenue (again assuming that half of all advertisers join the class action).
Now taking that there is about $60,000,000 (greedy lawyer fees subtracted) to spread among the money-for-nothing loving masses, you would be entitled to a whopping $10.6k and change or a little over 1% of what you spent.
On a million spent that is not bad but the awards are issued as AdWords credits, which can only be applied to 50% of new clicks. Yes, you have to match the credit with cash to be apply it to your account.
So Google is giving you credits to pay them for a service that cost them nothing and based on the settlement has some issues with billing for bad clicks. Good scam, should actually pad their bottom line.
Is it even worth the paperwork?
Is there bad karma in suing Google? Consider that most all members of this forum make their bread from Google