AdWords... Doesn't make sense...

I was thinking about google's AdWords.
Something doesn't make sense.
Let's say I signed up for 20 clicks a day.
And my competitors would click away 20 times on my link first thing in the morning, every day.
Then my ad will not get a chance to show... right?

I'm being honest here.
If I see my competitor on the side of Google? I will click that link until that link will not show.
Won't you?

Or do they have a system to prevent that?

Goodle has methods in place to prevent click abuse. I would be careful if your clicking on your competitors links just to get them to reach their daily limit. Google can see your ip address when you click on an ad.

Exactly Phaugh. I think it is something like more than 3 clicks to an ad. I have a client that gets thousands of clicks a day and sometimes we receive a refund for fraudulant clicks.

Google helps fight the problem, but there is no real big solution for it. Some companies out there help fight them problem and closely monitor your ads.

There will always be click fraud, whether it be from competitors or people being paid to click on ads...yes they are out there.

We had a big issue with including our ads in the content network...we were getting all these clicks yet no sales or even inquiries....we had a disproportionate amount of visits to the main page but no clicks through to the product pages....obviously abuse from someone running adsense ads and trying to earn a few pennies by clicking on ads they were displaying on thier site. I sent my weblog to google showing dupe and similar ip addresses and they credited us back from those clicks. All of the ip addresses were from the Netherlands...we sell real estate in Colorado...not exactly a viable product to user on the other end of the globe.

So.. what happens if google finds my IP address?
Will they investigate to see who I am and which web sites I own so they can ban me from their web site? or.. will they sue me for clicking too many times?

I'm just curious

I don't know...I would think they would just ignore it...unless it happened everyday. They have better thing to do then chase people for a few clicks....although there was some guy who built a bot that was capable of automating the clicking of ads and they had him prosecuted.

Yeah click fraud is definitely prevalent and something Overture and Google don't like talking about. But if you raise the issue they are very helpful in working with you to alliviate the problem.

Here's a great article by Jessie Stricchiola who pretty much coined the phrase "click fraud"

http://www.alchemistmedia.com/CPC_Click_Fraud.htm


I wouldn't let this scare you into doing google adwords and overture however. What industry are you in? I would look into your keywords and try to find better combinations and more relevant words. Also why not bid for #2 or #3? There's a lot of research out there that says bidding for #1 will get you a lot of click-happy people that don't even want to buy things. People who click on the #1 spot, then the #2 spot are more qualified, visitors usually.

Good luck - PPC, if done right can really work well.

They can't really prosecute anyone for click fraud.

It's easy to detect click fraud. But difficult prove fraudulent intent. Unless it's some organized network or something.