This story over at Netimperative is a good read for anyone who wants to grok clickfraud, and it includes a good tick tock of several advertisers’ travails.
Let’s face it, click fraud is bad news for the advertiser, but it’s still pouring millions into search engine bank accounts.
So, is it feasible that they really would want to put such a concerted effort into something, which effectively, helps them make less money?
In Jake’s case, he presented them with refined data which he’d pulled together himself. Once Google had analysed the data, they got back to him (within five days) and agreed that it was fraudulent activity and agreed to a refund.
I have to say, in my further conversations with both Jessie and Jake, we were all agreed that, as Jake put it “there’s an insane number of PPC advertisers who don’t bother tracking. They don’t bother using unique URLs for monitoring and ROI purposes.”