Suspecting a Competitor Is Clicking Your Ads

Clicks every morning, and a quiet phone

A carpet cleaning company has watched its ad clicks creep up over the winter while the phone stays quiet. Many of the clicks arrive between seven and eight in the morning.

The owner has a theory. A rival across town, he suspects, searches for carpet cleaning on the way to work and clicks the ad every day to drain the budget.

It can happen. More often the explanation is closer to home, and AdWords has already caught, and declined to bill, some of what looks suspicious.

What AdWords filters before you pay

Google runs every ad click through automatic filters. Clicks it judges invalid are discarded: rapid repeats on the same ad, clicks from automated programs, and clicks from sources it already distrusts.

Those clicks are never charged. When Google finds more after the fact, they appear as credits on the billing page.

The filters look for patterns across a great many accounts. One person clicking once each morning from an ordinary connection can look like any other customer, which is why your own checks matter.

The column most advertisers never turn on

AdWords shows what its filters caught, but not by default. On the campaigns tab, the columns menu can add two performance columns: invalid clicks and invalid click rate.

Repeats from one machine will often appear there, filtered and free. A steady figure in that column means the system is doing its job.

If it shows almost nothing while the suspicion stays strong, the clicks were judged genuine, and the cause probably lies in the account or the site.

What to check before blaming anyone

Clicks without enquiries usually have ordinary causes. Work through these first:

• Your own clicks, from staff searching for the ad to see that it is running.
• Search terms that have nothing to do with your service.
• Locations outside the area you serve.
• Display and app placements, where taps are often accidental.
• The hour of day, which can match your own routines.
• The site itself, where a broken form or a hidden phone number loses the enquiry.

The first is common and easy to stop. The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool shows whether an ad is appearing without a search or a click being counted.

Reading the reports AdWords already has

The search terms report lists the actual searches that triggered your ads. Broad keywords can match searches you never intended, and each of those costs a click.

The geographic reports show where clickers were. The default location setting also reaches people outside your area who have shown an interest in it. That suits a resort; it rarely suits a local trade.

The hour and device reports show when and on what the clicks came. A burst at seven every weekday on phones may be commuters, or your own crew.

The placements report on the display network tab lists the websites and apps where ads appeared. Taps inside phone games are a familiar source of clicks nobody meant to make.

A worked example

A window replacement company with three installation crews runs a search campaign across its region. Through January the owner saw clicks climbing while estimate requests stayed flat.

A competitor had recently opened nearby, and the timing looked suspicious.

The invalid clicks column showed a modest number filtered each week, all unbilled. The search terms report showed something larger: the broad keyword windows was matching searches about computer software and car windows.

The geographic report showed clicks from other provinces, reached by the default setting. The morning clicks came mostly from the company's own office, where the manager clicked the ad daily to check the link.

The keywords were rewritten around replacement windows and doors, with software and auto glass searches added as negative keywords. Locations were limited to people in the service area, and the office switched to the preview tool.

The clicks left in the account now come from people nearby searching for what the company sells, and any remaining doubt can be checked against the site's own records.

Excluding addresses you know

Each campaign's advanced settings let you exclude particular IP addresses, the numbers that identify an internet connection. Ads then stop showing to anyone on those connections.

Exclude your own office first, so staff can search freely. A competitor's address can be excluded too, if you genuinely know it, though many connections change their address from time to time.

The server's logs record the address and time of every visit. With auto-tagging on, paid visits carry a marker in the page address, so repeated clicks from one connection can be picked out.

Reading those logs is a job for whoever looks after the hosting. Analytics, by design, does not show visitors' IP addresses.

When to ask Google to investigate

If the logs show one connection clicking day after day, and the invalid clicks column shows nothing filtered, gather the evidence: dates, times, addresses, campaigns and keywords.

The AdWords help centre has a form for reporting suspected invalid clicks. Google's specialists review the account and credit any clicks they find invalid.

Keep the matter between you and Google. Accusing a rival on the strength of a pattern is unwise, and the evidence rarely settles who was at the keyboard.

The counter-case

In a small market with a few aggressive competitors, deliberate clicking does happen, and no filter catches every determined person clicking by hand.

The order of work does not change: check your own account, exclude what you can, and report what remains with evidence.

From the outside, a budget leaking through its settings looks much like sabotage. The settings are far easier to fix, and fixing them first makes any real pattern stand out.

Before accusing the rival across town

1. Turn on the columns for invalid clicks.
2. Stop clicking your own ads and use the preview tool.
3. Go through the search terms and add negative keywords.
4. Check where the clicks came from and tighten locations.
5. Review display and app placements for accidental taps.
6. Exclude your office and any address you know.
7. Report what remains to Google with evidence.

Step three deserves the most time. Searches you never meant to buy look exactly like a rival's clicks from the outside, and negative keywords stop them the same day.

The default settings that let a new campaign reach well beyond its area, and which to change first, are covered in the free AdWords credit that came in the mail.

Frequently asked questions

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