Google Fraud – It hurts when you’re the target.
Do you know the story of the merchant who relied on Google to promote his services – until his new business was brought to a virtual standstill due to Adsense fraud?
Read on……
Google has for some time distributed advertising through its Adsense Content Network, and most advertisers I’ve spoken with include the content network in their campaigns, even though the results are typically poorer than searched terms.
However, when one particular advertiser’s Google Adspend doubled month on month for 3 months – without any improvement in the lead flow – they started to question its effectiveness.
They started searching for their own terms and found that in actual fact, as their daily budget was now lower than their spend – their ads had all but disappeared from Google so they were missing our on the search results – which is where their value lay.
They approached Google screaming “fraud” and were told that their ads had slowed as they were not spending enough money and that if they wanted the exposure all they needed to do was increase spend. Google Support also informed them that if there was fraud they’d most certainly have picked it up and automatically credited the merchant.
Needless to say, this did not satisfy Advertiser.
Advertiser was not prepared to accept this and insisted that Google checked again, threatening to terminate the campaigns. After investigation Google found that indeed they had fraudulent activity in the Content Network and credited the merchant’s account with almost 60% of his adspend for the period.
Google have however not yet disclosed any information such as the fraudulent site name and what actions they’ve taken to rectify the matter.
So what’s the moral of the story?
You cannot just run your Google (or any other PPC campaigns for that matter) by “remote control”.
You cannot rely on your PPC service provider to automatically detect fraud.
You have to check your metrics regularly and don’t be afraid to speak directly to your service provider.
Even if you’re only one advertiser you have bargaining power – and need to exercise it!
Good companies like Google are more than willing to investigate claims of fraud if you bring it to their attention.
