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Spideroak Catches Google Adwords at Click Fraud
According to their Blog [spideroak.com] SpiderOak ditched [spideroak.com] Google Analytics for their website a few months back, in favor of their own home grown analytic software running on their own servers. They were also testing Google AdWords, which inserts small ads in pages, for which Spideroak would pay by the click.
One thing they noticed was that their Google AdWords click counts didn't seem to agree with their own analytics and web logs. They were getting billed for clicks that never did arrive at their servers.
I dug into Google AdWords Reporting — which I can report is pretty nice — and was able to learn a little bit more about the numbers. Seems that that over 85% of our clicks were coming from the Google Display Network (not Search) and well over 50% of the clicking was happening in Romania, Brazil, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, Philippines and Bangladesh. After a bit of sorting and filtering of the data I get another surprise, . When I compare all this info with our analytics data I see that most of the UIDs (unique identifiers of those who click) have more than one click — in fact most have dozens and several are over a hundred. Why would the same people keep clicking on the same ad?
Their ads were all in English, but their clicks were from non English speaking countries.
Further when they started comparing the click data from Google to their own analytics they found that half those clicks never arrived at Spideroak servers
SpiderOak just spent $1,168.01 and nearly half of those clicks didn’t result in a visit?
Google AdWords offered this explanation in their documentation;
“A click is counted even if the person doesn’t reach your website, maybe because it’s temporarily unavailable. As a result, you might see a difference between the number of clicks on your ad and the number of visits to your website.”
Bullshit. Our site was certainly not unavailable.
Do any other Soylentils have experiences with web advertising that seemed a little questionable?
