Findwhat Fraud?

Anyone else in the financial / insurance sector using Findwhat with success?

I did a test with them yesterday and the results were bad...worse than bad...fraudulent. I explained to them how I tracked everything with Bothunter and could tell that when visitors hit the page and were gone within 0.7 seconds that it was shady. They responded saying that there was nothing out of the ordinary. So...if that is ordinary traffic, let my warning serve to you if you are in the financial / insurance industries to not bother. You'll get a ton of hits from scraper sites that spoof IP addresses:
makemesearch.com
coolwebsearch.com
placeforsearch.com
lovingsearch.com
ms-search.com
searchmeup.com
enjoywebsurf.com
etc, etc, etc

I'm extremely upset at Findwhat for trying to skirt around the issue, saying that everything is fine and that the traffic is normal. This is the worst CPC experience I've had, and I was around when Overture first started getting slammed with click fraud.

Cygnus

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum85/67.htm

See post #19

Bernard -

I'm not a WMW member; what's the gist of the post?

Findwhat just requested my log files from yesterday, which I readily supplied. Let's see how good their analysis software is. Granted, it won't stand up to Bothunter, but that's okay...I just want them to:
1. See the problem
2. Fix the problem
3. Refund my money so I can
(a) Test out a different engine OR
(b) Try their services again, if they are improved

Cygnus

Try this thread then:

http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10192

Thanks Bernard. That is absolutely infuriating -- there needs to be a solid alternative to Adwords and Overture; neither is perfect, so having yet another player (waiting a year for MSN might have to do) would force the players into further improvement.

Testing out Adwords today for the same keyword phrases and same CPC for this site...no clicks. Why? Because they are on page 3-4. That's the way it is supposed to work. At least Google got something right. I guess I'll continue to recommend only the big two for PPC services for my clients.

Cygnus

Well, that's the end of Findwhat's chance of doing business with any of my clients...these guys either don't care that their publishers are defrauding advertisers through the use of clickbots and spoofed IPs, or they are in on the deal. Either way, DON'T USE FINDWHAT.

Repeat after me: findwhat fraud, findwhat fraud, findwhat fraud.

Their reply to me was that the traffic was valid and was due to high positioning...the morons apparently didn't check the data, because the highest I was ever showing during that brief 2-3 period that they drained the funds was #17...they claim I was within the top 3, but bothunter shows otherwise.

Again...findwhat fraud, findwhat fraud, findwhat fraud.

The adwords campaign is moving along nicely though -- stick with them.

P.S. This thread now ranks #1/2 in Google for 'findwhat fraud'. May others reading this heed my message.
Cygnus

Cygnus, I agree whole heartedly. There needs to be higher quality alternatives. As much as I dislike Google, they are a class act when it comes to the adsense program and how they manage it. I've read many times where G has credited advertisers without the advertisers ever knowing they were victims of click fraud. This will keep them ahead of the game.


Overture is a distant second IMHO and that is who I use when I run advertising.


Cheers

Thanxs for the heads-up about Findwhat Cygnus, I was on the point of giving them a try as an alternative smaller PPC since Goclick seems to have gone to the dogs since they changed hands.

They continue to deny that the traffic was fraudulent, so getting other people to not waste their money with Findwhat is just as good as getting a refund...I'm glad you found out about them.

I used FindWhat a couple of years ago and the money went very quickly compared to AdWords & Overture. I didn't track things properly then. I expect most advertisers don't track their PPC ads properly, so just keep spending 'blindly' with them.

Google adsense is not perfect but they are trying. It must be overwhelming to run a program like it.

I gave up on them about a year ago. My listing wouldn't get a click for a KWP for months and all of a suddent 60 clicks in one day! That kind of thing happened a couple of times if I changed the listing from say 4th place to 3rd place then - boom! tons of clicks when before had none and no sales to say it did any good.

Those of us that have been in PPC for 4+ years all know to avoid Findwhat. They have always been the worst of the worst and will not improve. So long as they can recycle new advertisers they don't care about rebuys. Very sad company - I am astonished they have lasted this long.