Danny Richman - 18th Feb 2010

A client recently contacted me about her Adwords campaign. The campaign had been running for over 2 years with no adjustments to bids, keywords or settings.  She was concerned because her monthly spend had started to go through the roof while the number of conversions remained static. Content Network advertising had already been disabled.

I immediately ran a Search Query Report on her account to see what could cause this sharp increase in clicks. The report showed me that since Jan 5th 2010 (a 6-week period) there were 69,340 impressions for the query “media sales media publishing digital jobs”. These impressions resulted in a large number of clicks to her website, used up most of her daily budget and didn’t result in a single conversion.

My client has a Phrase Match bid on some of the words contained in “media sales media publishing digital jobs”. She does not however run a recruitment website in this sector. We have now added “jobs” and other employment related terms to her negative keyword list to make sure that her ad no longer appears for this phrase.

While we may have been successful in stopping the ad appearing for this strange query in the future, I was curious to discover…

• Why would 69,340 people in the UK use an odd phrase like “media sales media publishing digital jobs” as a search query?
  
  
• Why would 69,340 people in a 6 week period suddenly start using this query? A Search Query report before this date showed not a single person used this phrase in the past 2 years!

Suspecting possible click fraud, I wrote to Google to ask them for an explanation. After 3 canned responses, here is their reply:

We have received your request for an invalid clicks investigation. Thank you for your patience while we reviewed your account. I apologize for the inordinate delay in responding to your email. [Is this starting to sound like an Indian call centre to you too?]. I understand you are concerned about the rather well formatted query 'media sales media publishing digital jobs' you have received clicks on.

We reviewed your account and can confirm this. We noticed that these clicks were accrued on www.MediaWeekJobs.co.uk, a high-traffic and popular site in our search network. It appears that this site uses the relevant links users click on to generate associated search queries. Ads are then shown based on these queries.

For instance, the URL http://www.mediaweekjobs.co.uk/jobs/digital--online is available under the browse hierarchy "Sector > Digital/Online ," thus generating the query 'Media Sales Digital jobs.' Note that you can use the query in such instances to guess the pages your ads are showed on.

Please be assured that the clicks are valid. The clicks charged fit a pattern of normal user behaviour. As part of our review, the team looked through dozens of data points--including IP addresses, IP blocks, geographic concentrations, network activity, browser patterns, click timings, and any proprietary signals. However, none of those suggest an automated attack, nor collusion from unethical users. The clicks accrued reflect normal user traffic.

Sincerely,

Kartik
The Ad Traffic Quality Team

 

By visiting the www.MediaWeekJobs.co.uk website mentioned in the email I quickly realised that the search facility on this site is designed for internal search only. My (mistaken) understanding of the Search Partner Network was that the sites allowed users to search the entire Internet. I had no idea that these searches could be restricted to the internal site only. In most cases this makes the users of those sites much less less likely to convert than a user searching outside of the partner’s site.

I also believe there is a big difference between a user entering a query into a text box and someone who builds an unseen search query by drilling down through a list of directory categories. A user manually entering a phrase has thought through exactly what they want to find. A user selecting categories from a list is often clicking the closest match available and could be unknowingly building a query that has no relevance at all to my client’s target keywords. It may even be directly misleading to describe a website offering filtered results of their own content via navigational links as a "Search Partner" in the first place!

Google must make advertisers more aware of the implications of bidding on the Content network and the Search Partner network.The use of these services needs to be explained clearly and in plain, simple terms that non-techie small business owners can understand. These networks should also be disabled by default when anyone creates a new campaign.

While Google allows people to use these services unknowingly, they not only cause further damage to their reputation (what's left of it!) but they will also ultimately damage their own bottom line. How many small business owners do you know who started using Adwords and then ran away 6 months later when the bills got out of control and the extra traffic generated few extra sales? Google's churn rate must be huge!

My advice? Unless you really know what you’re doing, stay well away from Google’s Content Network and their Search Partner Network.

I'd love to get your feedback on this (my first ever) blog post.

Danny Richman
Richman Software - SEM Consultants