PPC Publishing disaster, rebuilding with hope

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thisismyempire

Joined: Apr 23, 2008

# Posts: 3

Posted: 04/23/2008 03:08 am

Hello to everyone. My first post on here.

we have been developing websites from scratch for a year now, slowly learning the best ways to get all my domains up and running with the greatest success. In doing this we have created an advert server which manages all the ppc advertisers that we had registered with. It became a huge task when the advertiser code was on the webpage, so the adserver was the best solution. It manages 31'000 unique users every month. Naturally we wanted to cash in on this as much as we could. We were using lots of ppc publisher accounts to compare the click through and cpc values of each publisher account on each domain, planning to then only have the most productive for each domain running on that domain. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, to cut a long story short we hit trouble in January. Bidvertiser contacted us with a concern of some illegal clicks. They gave us the ip's involved and we checked our counter stats and server stats. The IP's were proxys, so we banned the whole range from our adserver. We told bidvertiser this and they confirmed that they would also ban the ip's individually from their end. This, we thought, was the end of that.

About 2 days later AdBrite suspended our account for illegal clicks. We assumed that whoever had made illegal clicks on our bidvertiser adverts had done the same with adbrite. We contacted them and requested the ip's involved. They refused to give us this information. A day or two later and Google suspended our account. Again we contacted them explaining the situation and requested the ip's involved. We told them that we would be banning the whole range if they were proxys again. Google never replied. AdBrite have dragged their feet since day one and last week we managed to get some sense from them because we threatened to take them to the small claims court.

The main problem that we have is that we advertise in a lot of places, we offer some services such as free blogs and forums. While we monitor these to ensure they are meeting our terms and conditions, we obviously have no direct control over their users. Nor do we have any control over the users of the websites that we directly manage. But it seems that you can destroy a sites income by just clicking continuously on their adverts.

This has left us with only a few publisher accounts. We are desperate to get more, but we can not find any half decent ppc/contextual services that offer the 3 main advert sizes that we have (468x60, 120x600, 728x90). Ideally we are looking for something similar to google or bidvertiser with text or image adverts. We have seen a lot of websites, but most of them like cj require you to make the list of services you want to rotate and it just doesn't meet our needs.

If anyone has any suggestions we would love to hear them.

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Quadrille

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Joined: Nov 15, 2000

# Posts: 1064

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Posted: 04/23/2008 05:17 am

First you need to investigate the abuse - or it will just kepp on happening.

Have you upset anyone lately?

Have you fired someone?

Has someone on your team got a bit too keen and hired a click agency?

I see little point in carrying on with ever weaker affiliations, or soon there'll be no income available to you.

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thisismyempire

Joined: Apr 23, 2008

# Posts: 3

Posted: 04/24/2008 05:56 pm

HI, thanks for your reply. i am the only one with logins for the affiliate accounts and I doubt anyone would have gone click crazy. If they work for me they would have at some point worked on my SEO site so would know that the companies would be able to spot something like that.

I have not fired anyone.

I have lots of enemies since I started online. A couple of death threats. But that aside, from the information I was given and looking at the server stats, I could see that the clickers were using proxy servers. I dont think you can trace them any further back. I suspect it was one person using proxys from all around the world.

Adbrite are now offering to re-open part of my account and pay me if i send them photo id.

But my main concern is that this can happen again and could be used to destroy a site's income. google are still refusing to open discussions and are still enforcing my life time ban. At least I assume it is a lifetime ban.

Is it even illegal to repeatedly click a sites adverts?

many thanks

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Quadrille

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Joined: Nov 15, 2000

# Posts: 1064

Website

Posted: 04/25/2008 01:57 pm

"Is it even illegal to repeatedly click a sites adverts?"

Whether it's illegal or not is not the issue - it is against the TOS, and will almost always end in account termination.

It is, of course, pretty stupid smile

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thisismyempire

Joined: Apr 23, 2008

# Posts: 3

Posted: 05/18/2008 10:28 pm

No, I dont think you are understanding me. I know that it would be against TOC if I clicked my own adverts. My question was "would it be illegal if someone clicked my adverts repeatedly". That is what happened and as you mentioned it would be in my best interest to try and track them to prevent this happening in the future.

but surely the ppc companies have some level of responsibility towards this. Otherwise, you could take out a companies advert revenue by repeatedly clicking their adverts.

What is there that I can do?

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Quadrille

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Joined: Nov 15, 2000

# Posts: 1064

Website

Posted: 05/19/2008 02:04 am

They do have a responsibility - to the folk paying for the ads.

That's why they are so quick to close accounts where click fraud occurs.

Remember, click fraud does not make Google suffer - it makes Adwords clients suffer, and Google does not want to lose customers.

In my experience, the main 'click' companies are doing their best to stamp out fraud without victimising publishers, and I've had two experiences where I nearly lost my Adsense account.

Both times I didn't; partly because of stupid fraudsters, partly because I cooperated 100% (in one case, I told them there was a problem). And partly, of course, by luck; as you say, sometimes the fraudsters are sophisticated enough to make it hard to see what's occurring.

But you'd be surprised how sophisticated Google (and others) are; I've heard many complaints of 'Google victimised me', where eking out the details showed that 'cousin jim' had helped out, or there was a message inviting clicks, and in one case, an email to friends - all those eventually admitted by the person claiming victimisation. Many others go strangely quiet when cross examined.

Be clear; I'm not accusing you of anything; but as I said, you need to look at your enemies and friends, and if you can help stop fraud (and it is fraud), then you'll help yourself.

But read your terms and conditions; if your site is being used for fraud (by whoever!), then your account can (and will) be terminated.

Think about it - what else can they do?

It's not personal - it's business.

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