Case Study - Sometimes It Ain’t Click Fraud

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

I was recently working with a client based in the US who had seen a masive increase in click through and no corresponsing increase in conversion. He contacted me with a view to investigate possible click fraud.

As a starting point I obtained an invalid click fraud report (see below). From this we can see an incredibly suspicious increase in clicks and cost per click

I asked for a copy of their web server logs to run through my analysis tool to see what was causing this problem.

The company works in the US mortgage space, a notoriously competitive and expensive place to advertise. An arena ripe for competitor click fraud attacks.

The client’s technical team went off to retrieve the logs for the particular weekend when the problem occcured, only to come back and report that the logs were not available. They could not be retrieved from the backups, they had gone missing! The month before and after were available but nothing for the suspicious weekend.

Lightbulbs lit up in my mind, but I did not want to alarm my client without any foundation. I thought this was an inside job.

Sure enough my client came back to me, a disgruntled employee had increased the cost per click and expanded the campaign widely . They also deleted the web server log files for the period in an effort to cover their tracks. The nett result was a click bill for perfectly valid clicks to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Needless to say the employee was shown the door very quickly.

The moral of the story, it’s not always click fraud, and only very trusted employees should be give the keys to your pay per click budget. The damage to the bottom line can be huge if your Adwords admin goes rogue.

These clicks were perfectly valid, and internal grudges is not an acceptable reason for a refund from Google.

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