Google Adwords Click Fraud

It appears that after several years, I have finally been bitten by the Google Adwords "click fraud" that I have heard so much about. It only cost me 60 dollars (on about a 36 hour window mind you, I'll explain that later), but it's still irritating.

I discovered this while I was showing off all the neat features of Google Analytics to Fionna's boss last Friday. The first thing I noticed on login was that web traffic was way up due to the Adwords content network, and a quick check showed that the budget for Adwords was completely blown (I have it set to the minimum of 20 dollars a day.) Given that the normal budget is around 2-3 dollars, this was very unusual.

I thought at first that maybe some big gaming site had linked to us, but that doesn't make any sense - adwords doesn't work that way. After some hunting around, Fionna's boss and I found that almost all of the new hits were from china, almost all of them were for very short or zero time, and hardly any of them clicked on any other links. In short, I got a boat load of hits from people who were either totally uninterested, or (as we found out later) simply couldn't read english.

I contacted google, who eventually responded back saying that everything looks fine, and that the traffic was routed from game.7679.com, a valid gaming site. Except that:

7679.com is entirely in Chinese, for a Chinese audience, in China, and the ad that was displayed to users with an astonishingly high click through rate was targetted for blind/visually impaired english speaking players using screen readers.

Does anyone see the problem with this?

The fight with Google is ongoing, and now that I have posted this and cleared my thoughts a little bit, I'm actually more irritated about it than before. Time for another nasty note.

(Regarding the 60 dollar loss - I got unlucky in this regard. I had checked it Wednesday afternoon, and the bogus traffic started on Wednesday night. They hit the site so hard that it ate the entire ad budget in only a couple of hours on Wednesday night, then the entire budget in the first couple of hours of Thursday. I neglected to check it on Thursday because I had other things going; Friday morning, the entire budget was blown in the first couple of hours, while I was sleeping. By the time we discovered it on Friday afternoon, there was little to be done other than disable the content network.)