Soldato
In 2006 a forumite posted on this forum a story of adword campaign with serious discrepancies between what they were charged for and what they saw in terms of traffic.
It's 2017 and I've just witnessed similar issue to the original poster.
A friend of mine embarked on a mission of gaining web presence for his small business (let's say plumbers) and established adword campaign to the sum of £10 a day.
Now I do understand that to have any success at all with google one should think minimum £600-1000 a month, but that's not the point. So far, the plumber in question hasn't made too many "virgin adworder" mistakes, bar throwing about £50 down the drain (pun intended) on AdWord Express, which as anyone who dealt with adwords knows - is a complete waste of money. With a help of his kid he quite quickly established relatively good thought out campaign, diversified his adds to mirror several choices of selected keywords, where the customer googles for "boiler replacement" tailored ad "we do boilers half price" appears, where they search for radiator flushing his "summer offer, half price radiator flushing" shows up, all locked to a region of just 10 neighbouring postcodes, etc, etc. So - on paper - good start.
He called me to check something for him though, having burned through his initial £25 and £75 voucher and the next 50 quid of his money, it looked to him as if google click stats did not correspond in the slightest to website logs. Now, I've just gone through his apache logs, and to be honest - it really does look as if google rigged this game silly. Where google claims - let's say 37 clicks to his website on a given day/week/weekend, the logs, at most show 7 visitors. Only 5 or 6 will have google referal. Out of those 6, two will be from US, despite all his campaigns being region locked (I've checked, all settings look legit, and his campaigns are strictly search network, no partners, no syndication outside google). Some of the visitor IPs repeat several times across the week in logs. So - you know - 3 maybe 4 real clicks out of 37 claimed and charged for, 5 out of 40, etc - that kind of thing.
This is easy to spot, because he was clever enough to point his campaigns to sub domains on day one, and it's a new trading name so he gets very little SEO traffic on that website. Even with traffic unrelated to campaign and main site visitors chucked in, the numbers are nowhere near the clicks/connections/leads google adwords stats claim. Website is fast and static, no delay in opening etc.
Now, it's not about whether these campaigns work or not, it's not about "all the intelligent people have adblockers", not about if his website is good enough or not, not about "organic SEO is better than PPC" or his ranking, or "not enough money spent" etc - I'm interested purely in numbers - to me it looks like google adwords stats are lying through their teeth - the numbers are completely made up. And I'll go as far as to claim that on quiet day it look like they have some bot in US data center symbolically click through them every now and then. I was quite surprised to find the posts above from 2006 claiming the same thing, but I've seen it with my own eyes and I can't conclude anything else. This being google - there isn't a much opportunity to have a recorded call or conversation with the makers of AdWords, but surely someone else must have noticed - if it's happening to small campaigns, then surely it must amount to hefty loses for those that spend serious money?
It's 2017 and I've just witnessed similar issue to the original poster.
A friend of mine embarked on a mission of gaining web presence for his small business (let's say plumbers) and established adword campaign to the sum of £10 a day.
Now I do understand that to have any success at all with google one should think minimum £600-1000 a month, but that's not the point. So far, the plumber in question hasn't made too many "virgin adworder" mistakes, bar throwing about £50 down the drain (pun intended) on AdWord Express, which as anyone who dealt with adwords knows - is a complete waste of money. With a help of his kid he quite quickly established relatively good thought out campaign, diversified his adds to mirror several choices of selected keywords, where the customer googles for "boiler replacement" tailored ad "we do boilers half price" appears, where they search for radiator flushing his "summer offer, half price radiator flushing" shows up, all locked to a region of just 10 neighbouring postcodes, etc, etc. So - on paper - good start.
He called me to check something for him though, having burned through his initial £25 and £75 voucher and the next 50 quid of his money, it looked to him as if google click stats did not correspond in the slightest to website logs. Now, I've just gone through his apache logs, and to be honest - it really does look as if google rigged this game silly. Where google claims - let's say 37 clicks to his website on a given day/week/weekend, the logs, at most show 7 visitors. Only 5 or 6 will have google referal. Out of those 6, two will be from US, despite all his campaigns being region locked (I've checked, all settings look legit, and his campaigns are strictly search network, no partners, no syndication outside google). Some of the visitor IPs repeat several times across the week in logs. So - you know - 3 maybe 4 real clicks out of 37 claimed and charged for, 5 out of 40, etc - that kind of thing.
This is easy to spot, because he was clever enough to point his campaigns to sub domains on day one, and it's a new trading name so he gets very little SEO traffic on that website. Even with traffic unrelated to campaign and main site visitors chucked in, the numbers are nowhere near the clicks/connections/leads google adwords stats claim. Website is fast and static, no delay in opening etc.
Now, it's not about whether these campaigns work or not, it's not about "all the intelligent people have adblockers", not about if his website is good enough or not, not about "organic SEO is better than PPC" or his ranking, or "not enough money spent" etc - I'm interested purely in numbers - to me it looks like google adwords stats are lying through their teeth - the numbers are completely made up. And I'll go as far as to claim that on quiet day it look like they have some bot in US data center symbolically click through them every now and then. I was quite surprised to find the posts above from 2006 claiming the same thing, but I've seen it with my own eyes and I can't conclude anything else. This being google - there isn't a much opportunity to have a recorded call or conversation with the makers of AdWords, but surely someone else must have noticed - if it's happening to small campaigns, then surely it must amount to hefty loses for those that spend serious money?