Unauthorized pop-ups ads?

[SEO Noob]

Hi everyone,

First, I just joined and I wanted to say what a great community this is!

Here's my problem. Our company is being served as pop-ups (perhaps by spyware?) when people visit other sites (seems like it's most common with online payment sites as our company has keywords in 'online billing').

Now we've never signed up for any of these annoying campaigns and only stick to Google and Overture. Is there any way to detect what sort of spyware might be doing this? I've heard that some spyware will look at the surfer's site and serve up the first google ad realted to the site as a pop-up.

I'd definately like to figure out what to do about this as this not only tarnishes our reputation (everyone hates pop-ups), but if it's running off a Google or Overture ad then it's costing us money.

Thanks!

[Chris Boggs]

First thing you need to find is an example of a site that is serving the popups. Once you have that, you should be able to track where it is coming from by clicking on the link. Once you do that, report it immediately to Google or Overture (Y!SM now) and if you have been charged for any such clicks they should reverse those charges.

[SEO Noob]

Thanks for the advice.

Right now, some of the sites that we've been apparently been popping up on are:
victoria secret payment site
wal-mart benefits site
citi-bank payment site

We've had some people try and go to these sites and duplicate this problem but to no avail... The people being mislead aren't the most tech-savy and don't know very much about the internet so it's hard getting the information we need. I'm almost thinking I have to go and download some spyware in order to find out. If only I knew which spyware program they have... :p

[krisval]

Do you have an affiliate program where the affiliates may be using pops? Do you use tracking URLs in G and O that can help you determine the source of the ads? Are the pops displaying your full page or a list of links?

[SEO Noob]

Do Google Ads Help Fund Spyware? (http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20050609/tc_zd/153770/nc:1212;_ylt=AnFh8JPrLeUbY9ea6QHDGPr6VbIF;_ylu=X3o DMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl)

Far as I know, we have AdWords, AdSense, and Overture with no affiliate program. We've done some ads with IndustryBrains but we're not using it at the moment. We have some tracking in place, but that's for the campaigns. If one of our content ads is being served it'll look like our content ad.

From the feedback from our 'leads' it looks like our full page (or one of our landing pages) is being served.

Some of the feedback is: "Well I was trying to pay one of my bills, and your page popped up. I thought it was required to download it before I paid my bill"

This is definatley not something I want our company to be associated with.

[krisval]

I just looked at IndustryBrains. I suggest you contact them to see if some of your ads are still in their network. It could be that one of their affiliates is still running ads??? They say they have a "search network"....who knows what that means.

Also, if you can do it, you should add a source to your tracking URL to track Google and Overture Ads that are visible via the browser. Sounds like you do track for conversion, but can you add ?source=google or ?source=Overture so that it will show up in the Address bar. If so, you can surf back on the sites in question to visually identify the source. You can also capture this as referrals in your logs.

It would be very interesting if you find out that a major network is using pops through an affiliate channel as described in the article that you posted.

[SEO Noob]

Well we've recently did some database digging and found that the ads are coming from our AdWords campaign (not AdSense). This puzzles me further. We've sent our information to Google to analyze and hopefully get a refund from the high cost of these weird pop-ups.

The users also don't have a 'last-page' that we can track.

That's the best we can hope for right now I suppose.

[joxmongoose]

A lot of PPC companies automatically give free contextual advertising to bidders in 1st place on their network. Pop-ups and Pop-unders are a very common form of contextual advertising. If you are the 1st place bidder on Yahoo! SM, then it is very likely that they have purchased contextual advertising space and those pop-ups are part of that venue.