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A long time member of Search Engine Watch Forums named Discovery has posted a thread named Massive Click fraud on Jan 17 06 describing click fraud like activity on his account.
On Tuesday Jan 17 over a 4 hour period from about 1pm to 4pm one of our keywords which previously produce 1 or 2 clicks a day within content match generated 2,134 clicks and charged up over $5,199 dollars.
With zero conversions....
He described his conversation with his Yahoo! representative and explained how the YSM Rep laughed off his remarks.
MugShot said he "had a similar experience with Y for a client where one of the phrases that were getting charged for clicks were not even in the active list!"
Join the discussion and share your horror stories with YSM at Search Engine Watch Forums.
Comments:
Bazkaz
01/19/2006 03:10 pm
That's pretty messed up that the Y! rep just laughed at him like that. The whole thing is messed up though. 1-2 clicks a day to 2000+ in 4 hours and they call it normal? Yikes.
Tom
02/13/2006 04:56 pm
I found a keyword in my Yahoo report with a 5.45 Content Match bid placed on it. I manually place all bids and never would bid so high. How did it rack up $600 in content match then last month? No idea. Yahoo guy looking into it. Hopefully a refund is forthcoming. I've pulled our company out of Google Adwords, and Yahoo's Content Match is next. Its so easy to exploit, and who knows how much we are wasting by less obvious fraudulent clicks. Sell your Google or Yahoo stock asap, I sense shit is approaching fan.
hlawton
08/22/2007 11:59 pm
Are Google, Yahoo and MSN robbing you? Why PPC waste/fraud is still continuing and why Google, Yahoo and MSN won’t help you find it. I have spent time looking at all the reports Google/Yahoo/MSN have been providing it’s customers for some time now. The one report that none of them provide is “Length of Visit by Keyword”. This is a report that would help anyone with managing PPC campaigns in a major way. So, why is this report not supplied by any of the search engines out there? It’s simple! If you knew which keywords people were clicking on and then just jumping out you could adjust you spending on those keywords accordingly. All the major search engines have the data and tools available to provide you with this report. I also believe that with the data that most of the major search engines collect that they could even provide us with a much better report than the “Length of Visit by Keyword” report I’ve been talking about. I would love to see the raw data that Google collects on the sponsored ad clicks. I bet if any of us could analyze that data we would save tons of money on our campaigns. As a side note… Wouldn’t you love to know what products have the best conversion rates and lowest advertising costs? Google and the others have this information. What power these people have! Another note… Google and the others know what products don’t sell well over the internet. They could come up with a list of products that have never sold well over the internet and at least warn people before they waste your money. I think a large percentage of people who try to sell something over the internet are wasting their money and I’m including the people who really know what their doing. They won’t help us with this critical data because they know once you see the waste you will adjust your advertising campaigns to reduce it. That would cost the major search engines billions of dollars once you do. Google and the others are basically hoping people don’t figure this out. Their saying lets give the customers a bunch of reports and analytics and hope they never notice what we’re not giving them. The report should at least contain: IP Address, Date/Time, Search term, Campaign keyword(s), Length of Visit, Number Pages Viewed, Conversion. All the major search engines are guilty of not providing its customers with this information. I have been looking for a tracking site that provides this information but have not had much luck. I’m sure I could find a service or piece of code out there that will provide the important data but why we are not getting these reports from the major search engines out there is a crime. Harvey Lawton