O Can A Da - Clicks from the Great White North

[Discovery]

In the past couple days we have seen more and more clicks from the great white North. Now how these sites are deemed a "content" partner is just a pure mystery.

http://dekasi.iquebec.com/

#1 - The website is from Canada
#2 - The website is under construction
#3 - The website language is in French
#4 - There is NO CONTENT other than a page that says its under construction in French!
#5 - Our campaigns are limited to the U.S. only.
#6 - Our campaigns are limited to English only.

What in the world is going on with Google's "Content" partners? How can they allow such crap to be part of their adsense program? Why should we bother setting any parameters on our campaigns if this is the junk we still get? And this is what they want me to raise my bids to a minimum $10 CPC for?

Discovery

[Mel66]

Hey Discovery, I've been seeing Adwords clicks from places like Peru in the past couple days. It hasn't been a large number, and with today's $10 fiasco I haven't had time to investigate it - but, like you, we're set to US only so we shouldn't be getting these clicks.

All day, I've been singing "Panama..... Panama-aaa...." I would bet this is a glitch like the $10 Question Of The Day but still, Yahoo is performing much better for us today...

That always was one of my favorite VH songs...

Melissa

[mcanerin]

That makes no sense to me at all. The only thing I can think of is that either someone is clicking on their own ads, or that the site used to be a good one and has been bought, etc

But that wouldn't explain almost everything else! It's clearly broken.

You know, if Google messes up the free search listings, that's one thing - you get what you pay for. It's quite another to allow this type of (dare I say it?) fraud to go on.

Maybe they should buy a few less lava lamps and spend the money on better click fraud controls and checks.

As long as we are constantly being deluged by Googler HR about all the nifty benefits googlers get, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to actually do their job, or to respond to the people who are paying for all those benefits.

Ian

[egain]

Have to say I had some similar experiences with a financial services client. I ran a campaign using such generic terms as "financial services manchester" and tailored to UK/English only however I left content match on.

The result was a number of "wasted" traffic from places such as Somalia, Pakistan and other places, all as a result of content match, even though the campaign was very specific both in matching, keyword selection and setup.

On the whole, Google provides a very good platform (particularly in comparson to Y & M), however ensuring that the guidleines of the campaign are adhered to, is surely fundamental

[jimbeetle]

the site used to be a good one and has been bought, etc

It looks more like a freebie subdomain from the iquebec portal. I'm assuming that some of the js at the top of the source is what builds a frameset to include the AdSense code.

Either way, French language, hosted in gay Paree, no context to serve ads -- no way there should be clicks.

[Discovery]

Mel,

I'm starting to hum Fair warning, or Loss of Control.

Last night I had a huge run on Canadian websites and visitors hitting our ads.
We logged them and will submit to Google. I raised this issue here to see if anyone else was experiencing the same thing. If they are not we'll simply address this privately with our account rep.

Discovery

[Mel66]

Loss of Control, indeed. I just pulled some reports from our analytics. Here are some of the countries we're seeing coming from Adwords (remember, we're set to US Only):

Mexico
Turkey
Venezuela
Russia
Brazil
Colombia
Argentina
Chile

As far as I can tell, this started sometime this month - we had no measurable Adwords traffic from any of those countries in January. And the percentage of foreign traffic is increasing week by week.

I'll address this with my rep, since I can't tell if we've been charged for these clicks; but in the meantime AWR, can you shed any light on this? We're talking several hundred clicks last week alone.....

Melissa

[Discovery]

Wow Mel,

We see the same thing!
and starting this month as well.
Last month only a small % of clicks from foreign countries via Google.
This month we have over 300 clicks in at least 3 accounts.

Like you, we have yet to determine if we are being charged for these clicks. Problem is, how can we truly determine that? We have to take Googles word for it, no?

Our top unwanted clicks are from:

Canada
France
Germany
Brazil

Also have clicks from
India
Spain
Puerto Rico
Mexico
Spain
and New Zealand!

Discovery

[Mel66]

Originally Posted by Discovery

This month we have over 300 clicks in at least 3 accounts.

I beat you for once. I'm over 1,000 and counting.

As you say, I don't know how to tell if we're being charged. But I'm gonna find out.

Melissa

[mcanerin]

This is NOT a good trend - either Google broke something, or someone with an international click fraud setup figured out a loophole.

Either way, it's Googles responsibility to fix it. AdWords Rep, any comments?

Ian

[Mel66]

AWR -- just so you know -- yesterday, fully 10% of our Adwords traffic came from outside the US (or the famous "unknown" country). If nothing else this is really throwing off my conversion metrics. Any light you can shed on this would be greatly appreciated.

Melissa

[Mel66]

I did some more digging into our analytics and here is what I've found on this issue. Almost 3/4 of this non-US traffic came from one ad group in one campaign - and most of that traffic came from one keyword in this ad group. The weird thing is, this campaign does not have the content network enabled. So it's not content gone wild as some of us suspected.

I paused the keyword yesterday. Guess what? Early stats from this morning show that non-US referrals are way down - although we're still getting more than we should be. We're back to 92% US traffic from Adwords - but before this all started, we were at 99+%.

My G rep is helping me with this - she's been great - but clearly something is broken, at least in this case. It appears to be click fraud, but what's worrysome about it is that (1) it's coming from the search network, and (2) we shouldn't have gotten ANY traffic from outside the US on this or any of our ads.

I'll post more info as I get it.

Melissa

[PPC]

Even though we should only be directing traffic to the US, Canada, UK and Australia, we still get at least 5-8% of our Google traffic from other countries. I wish we had our analytics set up properly (soon hopefully) so I could tell the exact number and pinpoint where in our account it is coming from. Also, so I could see conversion rate by country.