PPCGoogle Click Fraud Settlement: Why One Online Merchant Is Opting Out

Google Click Fraud Settlement: Why One Online Merchant Is Opting Out

Radiator.com is a company spotlighted in a recent Associated Press

article
about the
proposed
settlement
of a class action suit against Google over click fraud.

Radiator.com Boiling over Bum Clicks
from Multichannel Merchant takes a
closer look at Radiator.com’s experience with alleged click fraud and why the
company plans to just say no to the settlement.

The story details how Radiator.com didn’t feel Google took seriously its
claims, ironically despite also having used the company has a success story for
AdWords. From the article:

The result, Thys says, was a boilerplate e-mail message from Google?s
quality enforcement team informing him that the company had concluded, after
examining his data, that it had caught those bogus clicks before he was
charged for them and therefore that he had no fraud credits coming. The
message contained no itemized details about the data Thys had found suspect.
?They simply said, ?Thanks for the data, and by the way, our algorithms are
smarter than you, and we?ve determined these clicks were filtered out
already.??

To add insult to injury, the e-mail was signed simply ?Ray?. ?No last name,
no phone number, no e-mail address,? Thys says. ?To me that was insulting. We
were spending upwards of $20,000 a month with Google almost since they started
selling PPC ads. We followed their reporting procedure. Getting that kind of
result didn?t sit too well with me.

While opting-out of the settlement, the company has no plans to join another
lawsuit or start a new one. Instead, it hopes for an expanded pay-per-call
system, something Google is
testing:

What would make Thys feel better about running performance ads on the big
search engines?

?Calls,? he says. ?I?m begging for Google to expand their distribution
network with pay-per-call.? His company has run a small program on the network
operated by pay-per-call provider Ingenio and seen some good results. The
model makes perfect sense for radiator.com, which after all began life as
1-800-Radiator and operates its own CRM call center.

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