Invalid Clicks – The Dark Side of Google Adwords

Battling the Competition With Invalid Clicks!

As great of a marketing tool as Google Adwords is, putting your business out in front of the masses, it can also put your business at risk for fraudulent activity in the form of “invalid” clicks. These clicks can come from a number of sources, including telemarketers, robots, or your competition…okay, especially your competition. Unlike valid clicks, made by legitimate/potential customers, invalid clicks are blatant abuse, resulting in the actual theft of advertising dollars from an unsuspecting business.

Anyone who advertises using pay-per-click, such as Adwords, will undoubtedly check their ad placement on occasion. Some will monitor it daily, some hourly, some constantly. The whole objective is to get as high a position as possible on the first page of the search. There are two sure ways to get to the top of the page: You spend more (by bidding keywords higher) or “they” (your competition) spend less (or at least have less to spend). One way to accomplish the latter is to diminish a competitor’s budget by clicking their ads. I know my competitor’s click my ads (there are ways of knowing exactly who/where they are).  

No one has more to gain by clicking on your pay-per-click ad than your competitors. In fact, the whole process lends itself to perpetual fraud and abuse, as the recipient of an invalid click (or clickee) will soon become the “clicker”, looking to exact revenge on the guilty party. Not sure who it is? Click on everyone just to be sure (the others have probably clicked you at one time or another anyway). Only problem now is that you just started the whole process all over again, ten-fold. And this is not just an innocent prank or online version of “ring and run” (or doorbell ditch, depending on where you grew up). This is serious business with often serious financial consequences for those caught up in the fray.

More times than I care to remember I have checked my Adwords stats on any given day and watched my phone-specific clicks go from zero to 10, 20 or even more without the phone ringing a single time. Then the numbers may just as quickly retreat, as the Google fraud detection system kicks in and removes the bogus charges.  Did they catch them all? Maybe. Hopefully. Who really knows? You can call Google and ask them, but don’t expect a sympathetic response. They’ll explain the processes they have in place and may run an audit of sorts (just to make you feel good?) but don’t expect to get any kind of refund. The system supposedly gives you the benefit of the doubt if a click seems “questionable”. Sounds good, but even Google can’t really guarantee the validity of anything. And like it or not, through the years, I’m quite sure we’ve paid for many, many an invalid click. Chock it up to the cost of doing business.

In the end, the big winner will always be Google. I only wish I had bought stock in GOOG when it was around $100 per share (Monday’s close: GOOG $1031.55). Being a Google shareholder would at least make the invalid clicks seem less like a bad loss and more like a good investment!

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