AdWords has a new name for click fraud and it’s “comparative shopping.”

Let me start by saying I love AdWords. It is an amazingly powerful platform with very few hiccups. However, when you do encounter a hiccup, getting useful support can be frustrating. One recent hiccup was an issue with click fraud.

Comparison shopping is when users visit your ad repeatedly because they are shopping around for the best deal or an offer that speaks to them. Click fraud is when a user or a bot repeatedly clicks on your ad to charge your account without having genuine interest in your ad. It is easy for these two activities to mask each other. The difference is that the intent of click fraud in this case is to make you reach your daily budget so your ads stop showing for the day.

AdWords has an invalid click detection system in place that automatically detects and refunds the price of these clicks. It usually works pretty well, but if you think it missed something, you can always request that the AdWords Invalid Click Specialist Team investigate the matter further.

The Case

On October 31^st, an AdWords account registered 9 clicks for over $900 total. Google Analytics reported 9 only 2 users from paid sources. In layman’s terms, 2 users accounted for 9 clicks. 8 of the clicks happened in the same hour for the same location. Are those 8 clicks comparison shopping or click fraud?

This AdWords account is in the business of law services, which means the clicks are very expensive. Lawyers who advertise on AdWords know how expensive these clicks are and they know how to take it out on the competition.

On November 2^nd, I reached out to AdWords support for help with this matter. They replied that I can prevent this from happening in the future by banning that IP address. That’s an awesome feature, but it doesn’t exactly refund the suspected click fraud that happened on October 31^st. I research some more online and see that it can take a couple weeks for the invalid clicks to register. I wait a couple weeks to see if the issues resolves itself.

On November 17^th, I follow up on the click fraud since the invalid clicks have not registered in the AdWords interface. Their initial response started: “Thank you so much for your response!  For this issue, if you do not see a satisfactory refund for invalid click activity, this means that AdWords’ robust invalid click detection system did not find any invalid clicks.  It sounds like you have a 3rd party invalid click tracking system on your end…”

Google Analytics may be an invalid click tracking system, but it is definitely not 3^rd party. I plead to escalate this matter to their specialists. I include the attached screenshot from Google Analytics showing that there were only 2 users visiting the page on October 31^st from paid search. My plea is granted and this matter is escalated to the Invalid Click Specialist Team.

The Response

On November 18^th, I receive an e-mail titled Invalid Clicks Final Update. To summarize what they said:

• Sessions are different from clicks.
• Sessions are different from users.
• Because we think you don’t already know this, we are not going to put any actual work into investigating this.
• Your money is now belong to us.

I was never confused about sessions being the same as clicks or users. Their reasoning here was specious at best. I replied to the e-mail contending that the issue is that 1 user visited the site and generated 8 clicks. There were 2 users generating 9 clicks. 8 of the clicks happened in a very short time period from the same location from what Google Analytics deems to be 1 user. This has been and continues to be my contention for why this is click fraud. Their final response is attached below.

Without the IP addresses, there is no further investigation. This is “comparative shopping” based on their “investigation.”

How common is comparative shopping in this account? Excluding this 1 user and their 8 clicks on one day, there have been 134 users generating 142 paid clicks. That’s pretty damning evidence that comparative shopping is extremely uncommon in this account.

The Solution

Let’s assume AdWords support is correct and this isn’t click fraud. Maybe there was no malice to this one user who clicked eight times and did not convert. How can I prevent this type of behavior in the future? I can’t, at least not with the current options in the settings. Adwords would need to enable frequency capping on the Search Network.

Frequency capping would allow me to limit how many times a unique user sees my ad. AdWords could even program the option to limit how many times a user sees my ad after clicking it so many times in a day. However, as of right now, frequency capping is not an option and you’re screwed out of a hefty amount of spend if a competitive lawyer wants to go “comparative shopping” on your ads.