Illegal Clicks

[lightsofrose]

Hi everyone!

 

I just opened my website a few months ago.. not much traffic yet but I know it takes time. I joined Google Adwords which in my opinion if you dont have enough money for your budget you wont receive many clicks. I also joined MIVA they are another adword type of search engine that sends your website through other search engines ex- search.com and others. I notice I was getting lots of clicks with MIVA. MIVA is easier to use but more restricted with approvals of keywords and takes 24 hours for approval of ads.

 

I was ranked anywhere from 1-2 with MIVA with my keywords. I ranked so well that I was noticing some odd looking clicks on my daily reports and my daily budget was gone by 7am everyday.. I contacted MIVA with my concerns... Well they had to put a hold on my Ads for 3 weeks! They researched my reports and found illegal clicking from another Merchant. This Merchant was clicking on my ads deliberately.

 

I was not happy.. MIVA was not allowed to tell me who the Merchant was but they where banded from search engines (well at least under that website).

 

MIVA refunded me $50.00 the cost of what the other Merchant actually stole from me with their illegal clicks.

 

I felt angry but also complimented at the same time to think that some other merchant felt threatened by my webstore!

 

Just to warn you they are out there (illegal clicks) its dirty play and deceit by other Merchants!

[Guest]

That is the one downfall of pay per click search engines

 

 

Tim

[warleb]

I think they cal it click fraud

[frostybroc]

There are programs and scripts that actually track IP addresses to help prevent this. A friend's mom was going through the same issue.

[♥Vger]

Just finished reading a book about the founding and rise of Google - very good read. Who else would have thought of making server racks out of Lego bricks? However, they also had major problems with click-fraud on AdWords at one point in time and weren't too keen on doing anything about it. Eventually they were forced to by their major-budget advertisers and now have a Department just to monitor such activity.

 

About 6 months ago we signed up to put our ads on a very well used website, in addition to Google Adwords, and had to put £200 into the pot up-front. Within a couple of weeks it was gone and nothing to show for it. In addition to our own web statistics we had set up Google to track where clicks to our site were coming from - and not one of them had come directly from the site we were paying to put our ads on.

 

Vger

[clrob11]

I too had an adwords account used to stick about £10 a day for about 6 months. I got the occasional sale but nowhere near enough to cover my outlay. Most of my sales never came from the click thoughs anyway. So I have now stopped using adwords and am now using googlebase. I must have spent over 2k to try and help my site take off with adwords. A tough lesson learnt it seems unless the pot is endless then don't bother and save your money.

 

This is just my opinion of couse.

 

Chris

[clrob11]

I too had an adwords account used to stick about £10 a day for about 6 months. I got the occasional sale but nowhere near enough to cover my outlay. Most of my sales never came from the click thoughs anyway. So I have now stopped using adwords and am now using googlebase. I must have spent over 2k to try and help my site take off with adwords. A tough lesson learnt it seems unless the pot is endless then don't bother and save your money.

 

This is just my opinion of course.

 

Chris