AOL user draining my adword account

I have studied my logs see that for the last 2 weeks, aol ip addresses have been clicking away at my ads and only staying on my site for a fraction of a second. My campaign costs have quadrupled up over the last 2 weeks with no increase in orders.

From what I am gathering, if a user is on AOL and has cookies(and flash cookies) disabled, I more or less have no way of isolating the thief and no recourse.

I need the aol ads to keep running through google adwords since 1/4 of our sales come from aol buyers, but am at my breaking point.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

Thank you

block the ips of those abusing your system ....

Report that to the right authority and block the ip's through mod_rewrite.

I would tell the Adwords people.

I cant block the ip's or else I will block most all aol users. Everytime an aol user logs on, they get a new set of SHARED ip's. Millions of users all sharing a set of ip's. If I block the ones that hit me today, i'll efectively block tens of thousands of users and i need aol buyers since they make up a decent portion of my sales.

Thats so sad, I really feel for you. As far as I am concered that person deserves nothing better than jail time. I can't advice you on catching him although I wish I could, I can tell you if it is one keyword he is finding you with and coming in over and over then I would focus all my resouces in getting to the top of google (free search) with that one key word. I hope that is a resonable assumption that you could.

I'm just curious... does this mean that since AOL is a partner network, google has enabled faudlent clicks? Made it so the bill can be ran up with little or no recourse? Just curious.

Jritech has a valid point.

Generally, google tries to prevent fraudulent clicks by monitoring the IP addresses. If they see the same IP clicking on your ads over and over they will automatically filter out those charges.

However in your situation where they are all coming from shared IP addresses I see no way that they could possibly filter them properly.

Sounds like a major problem, I wish I had an answer for you bud

I would say no, I have been running with aol, and google for quite sometime and anytime there is big differences in data / HISTORICAL DATA, meaning I have a year of conversion data for the specific ad group / site and I HAVE AN OVERALL AVERAGE OF HOW IT WILL CONVERT, and if something does not fit into the DATA THAT I HAVE COLLECTED OVER A YEAR, then I call them and I say hey, this is click fraud giveme a refund, and all but 1 time have I not had a credit to my account, again this doesnt happen often at all but when it does, if you have thedata to back up your point you are good. And google does not play around whatsoever with fraudulent clicks, if it is detected plan on having your ip banned and anything your connected to google with banned. ... hope that helps.

I feel your pain. AOL traffic converts twice as much as any other engine so you have to stay there. And to be there you have to pay a premium to be in the top 3 in adwords to get into the Search Network to show up there.

I'm not sure the amount of money you are spending, but I have always spent a ton because PPC is part of SEO. Because of this, I've spent many hours data mining, testing click fraud software, and trying to track down rep's from Google, Yahoo and MSN, as well as 10+ second tier ppc engines (7search, Miva) to get refunds.

Google is a little different in that they claim to have already identified CF and never charge you for them.

Surprisingly enough, they only find a small amount each month. It's not hard to figure out. I mean think about it, why would Google care who clicks on the ads. They get paid either way.

They agreed to shell out 90 million last year to settle all outstanding claims against them for fraud committed using its pay-per-click ad system back to 2002, and without admitting guilt.

While this was still in litigation they offered the IPO which was expected to raise over 270m, based on numbers that included adwords revenue that obviously enhanced their portfolio.

The majority of their income is from Adsense. This is why you see things like this happening and Google pleading ignorance until someone comes along and provides undeniable evidence.

Need more proof Google could care less? You'll love this;
Buy 10,000 Unique Adsense clicks for $13

So my advice is to get into the habit of tearing your log files apart. I regularly get thousands back because I don't give up.

We even created an automated program that creates reports in several different formats that adhere to each SE's guidelines. They are submitted and then tracked closely.

I'm not saying we get 100% back all the time, but we get a lot more than the average 2%.

Here are a few options since you can't exclude AOL traffic:

Look for consistency:
1. Are they always coming in on a particular keyword or group of keywords? If so, then consider making changes to that keyword or removing it temporarily to see if the fraudulent clicks top. If it's a high traffic or high converting term then you'll have to be more careful with this option.

2. Do the clicks occur at a particular time? If so then consider displaying ads only during certain parts of the day. This tactic could also be used in conjunction with option 1 above to further target the user

3. Consider getting a different URL and creating a custom landing page that then links to your main site. This might even be good since you'll then be able to test out different landing pages (this is often the best way to quickly increase conversion rates).

All three of these tactics could be used together and may even help you optimize your account further.

I hope this helps.

-Brian