Reproduced with the permission of Neil Matthews.
Originally posted at http://www.clickqualityconsultant.com/index.php/2008/06/11/case-study-sometimes-it-aint-click-fraud/
I was recently working with a client based in the US who had seen a massive
increase in click through and no corresponding 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 occurred, 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.
Light bulbs 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 net
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 given 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.