The problem is that I run a Web Building Site called WebClickGo.com which allows users to create and publish their own sites (Just like google pages etc) and I place google ads on the free sites to cover costs. (I don’t allow users to publish there own ads and actively suspend users that try)

I have had periods where I have had much higher then average click-thoughs but can explain these completely. One site for example publishes a weekly print newspaper in India on the weekend and for a few weeks (while it was using our service) there would be large amounts of traffic as readers of there newspaper visited the site at the weekend. This generated lots of click through for a while (The content very specific and the ads very targeted) even i was surprised. (though it seems they have now got a professional site developed and redirected their domain). This is the only unusual traffic my account has seen but as I said is completely explainable.

Problem is without info from google I cant determine if this is the “trigger” or something else completely. I would love to sort this out as like most people I don’t like being accused of something I’ve not done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXilEu2EfI&eurl=

I am getting these questions all the time from our customers; I’d say about 1/2 of our small to medium sized AdWords users do not use the content network prior to signing up with us, we typically do turn it on for them, but the conversion rate questions invariably come up.

What I am curious about is Google’s position on sites with only ads and nothing else, how they are classified. Just because they are ads only does not prove click fraud. But, we did a little analysis with a half dozen of our customers and found they convert very rarely…way way less than your standard content click – ok, not a huge relevation, but nice to prove it wih real customer data. Ads only sites – are they classified in some special way, or just as a poor quality site, I wonder.
Ron
http://www.adisem.com

I was wondering if Google was going to do anything about those stupid SE’s that extract results from the Big 3, and then are listed in SE results. And at the top they’ll have zillions of Google Ads. It’s kind of redundant to gave SE results of SE results.

ZZPrices,.. I think Google agrees with these types of sites doing this as some even say they work together with Google on this. And I agree, it’s creating a bigger internet with completely redundant information, only order is changed.

Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I don’t see a hard limit on AdWords accounts in the documentation. There is a daily limit, but I don’t see anything that allows one to spend a fixed amount of money on a campaign, prior to the start of that campaign. In the pen analogy, one spends a fixed amount of money on the pens that will be provided at the conference. In this case, someone who steals the pens while no one’s looking, or takes more pens than those who run the booth prefer (because they want to ensure enough pens for the expected amount of people who will visit the booth) is acting comparably to a click fraudster.

Furthermore, I’d be surprised if there were a sizeable number of advertisers who view click fraud as a form of branding. One must also consider that programs can be written that generate clicks that are never viewed by humans.

Actually, I’m aware that there are advertisers who will attribute nonperforming campaigns to click fraud. A problem here is that fraudsters can take advantage of the fact that ordinary web surfing need not necessarily result in conversions. So the nonconverting clicks may or may not be fraudulent; we just don’t know.

The main point of a pen is to get your company name in front of people… Even if a person is clicking on your ad to make their own adsense account money, they’re still seeing your brand name in front of their eyes.

there IS a limit on spending… if you’re running an adwords account without a max spending amount then you’re doing it quite stupidly. (granted my company spends more in a month on adwords / overture than I make in a year.. but we still have limits)

I’ve run adwords accounts for many customers… and you’d be suprised how many people count every non-purchasing click as fraud. I think that’s the main problem here… there’s too many varying differences in the definition of fraud.

The two situations aren’t comparable. When a company puts out pens at conferences, it’s promotional — designed for branding. Even if the people taking the pens aren’t current, or even potential customers, the people who wind up using the pens might very well be. Pens are lent to coworkers, family, friends, etc. Furthermore, the number of pens at a given conference is fixed and determined ahead of time. Your analogy might carry more weight if conference attendees could cause arbitrary numbers of pens to be manufactured on demand at the promoting company’s expense.