Three Questions to Ask About Your Clicks

What to do when you get an unexpected traffic surge

There you are, reviewing your account from last week, when you notice a jump in your clicks. Before you call us to find out what’s going on with your account, keep in mind that unexpected traffic is not necessarily a cause for alarm. Consider the following three questions:

First: Have you changed anything in your account recently?

A broad question, to be sure, but try to recall: Have you added keywords or changed your bids? Either of these actions can affect your traffic.

Second: Are you noticing abnormal click activity, or just traffic that’s not converting?

Examine your account and your web logs. Are your ads appearing on sites that are not meeting your business needs? If so, we offer tools to help you control your traffic. Find out more about Blocked Domains, Geo-targeting and Continent Blocking in your Search Marketing Help Section, and get to know your traffic by visiting the Traffic Quality Center.

Third: Have you set a daily spending limit?

Your traffic may fluctuate from day to day. But by setting a Daily Spending Limit, you help control the amount you spend. For example, if you average $250 in clicks per day and set your Daily Spending Limit at $350, you can capitalize on the extra clicks that result from a spike, without breaking the bank.

Submitting a Click Review Request

If you feel you have explored everything above and still have questions, or would like us to investigate your traffic further, our Traffic Quality Center provides simple instructions for submitting a Click Review Request.

After you submit the request, we will perform a series of diagnostic tests and analyses to attempt to identify potential issues that may have affected your traffic. We take all inquiries seriously, and though the length of investigations may vary, we work to achieve a resolution within 10 business days of your request.

Remember, keep an eye on your account, monitor your traffic regularly, and if you do spot something suspicious, let us know—we’re happy to help.

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

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17 Comments Add your own

1. Weekend + Monday Roundup &hellip | February 11th, 2008 at 9:04 pm

[…] Three Questions to Ask About Your Clicks - Three questions to ask when you get an unexpected click surge. […]
2. (EMP) E-Marketing Perform&hellip | February 12th, 2008 at 8:11 am

[…] Three Questions to Ask About Your Clicks […]
3. Peg Davis | February 12th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

Great advice, Kastle. At MarketingExperiments.com we advise our readers that when conducting Landing Page optimization testing they should be on the lookout for the “history effect,” basically an extraneous variable associated with the passage of time; e.g. a holiday, a national news story related to your business, etc. Spikes in clicks or traffic can invalidate test results, so we have to get to the bottom of why they occurred, if at all possible. There are 3 other threats to test validity, so if your readers are interested in learning more they are welcome to our free research archive (no subscription necessary) and the specific article at http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conversion/optimization-validity-threats.html

Cheers!
4. Trevor Nash-Keller | February 14th, 2008 at 9:57 am

I also had the same situation happen. I called in and after being ignored for quite some time, I kept persisting and got my hundeds of dollars of cash flow back. Yahoo has certainly gone down the drain compared to even 6-12 months ago.

And what is with keywords randomly dissapearing from my account or being disabled or declined months after running fine. These are the MOST targeted keywords for my campaign also..?

I was switching everything over from google to yahoo, however that process has halted.
5. Patrick | February 14th, 2008 at 10:21 am

I have attempted campaigns with all yahoo, google and MSN. Suprisingly MSN seems to convert, its liek cutting a hole in your pocket with Google/Yahoo. The click fraud is rampant.
6. Marcos Figueira | February 14th, 2008 at 10:51 am

We use Yahoo since the early days (GoTo era then Overture).
From time to time the fraud seems more frequently –and obvious.

At our site (FlashToGo.com) we’ve ceated a landing page that requires a “human” to click to enter the site. We track both pages to investigate if Yahoo is sending real traffic. We have an average percentage of people that click to enter the site so we can monitor quite easy.

Frankly, from time to time the percentage drops dramatically. For example, if 70% of people that come to the landing page actually enters the site, some days the percentage drops to 30% or less, which clearly indicate false traffic.

The sad thing is that, despite Yahoo frequent traffic issues, Google converts less for us. At the end of the day, there is no much difference with regards to the Cost-of-Sale.

One piece of advice: at all costs avoid Kanoodle. From our experience, over 95% of traffic is fraudulent.
7. Rick | February 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

Let me say that most click fraud is apparent on many web server logs. I just don’t understand as a programmer, what the real difficult problem is . . . to create a system that catches these false & fraudulent clicks…
I had advertising going with MSN, Google, and Yahoo. So much click fraud has left our company “AutoSolutions” searching for another type of advertising. Sad but true.
8. Matt | February 14th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

Good comments here. I personally have not yet experienced blatant click thrus from anything deemed to be fraudulant from Google or Yahoo. However, I’m aware that those things happen. My comment here mirrors an earlier post about a congressional investigation. This online advertising stuff is a pyramid scheme. There are no set advertising rates like you have at radio, print, etc. Yahoo used to be a great company, but they have fallen from grace over the past year or so. Too bad because I am still a fan of theirs.
9. geld lenen | February 14th, 2008 at 1:34 pm

First of all, good that I found Yahoo inside blogs. A big question, perhaps better to mail it but: when will Yahoo start there program in Europe?

A lot of publishers are waiting for that!
10. Analysis | February 14th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

For sure you should know where the sudden bag of clicks come from… Maybe you are paying for that….
11. Is Paul McCartney Dead? | February 15th, 2008 at 12:00 pm

We have really struggled with Pay per Click, numbers are always high without the results that we want. Still trying to figure out how to make this work best for us.
12. Kat Milliker | February 17th, 2008 at 7:53 pm

Haven’t had too much problem with Google or Yahoo- the one we are having problems with, and recently s-canned was “CitySearch”. They billed us for hundreds of clicks, when our programs sowed the number of referrals was 5 or 6 per month. When I canceled our account, the rep got very indignant and asked me how I “could possibly know how much traffic I would be losing”? . . . . . Hmmm, maybe because it’s my job to know that information?

I would avoid them at ALL costs.

Kat Milliker
13. SEO Company | February 18th, 2008 at 9:36 am

Very interesting…Full of advices!
14. Jim | February 23rd, 2008 at 6:46 pm

Anyone even thinking about PPC needs to read this:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003001.htm?chan=innovation_branding_top+stories

I have found that paying a small amount for worthless clicks does offer a return in increased results from generic search. I don’t care what the companies say about the two being unrelated.

My experiences publishing ads were as poor as those buying ads.
15. CPCcurmudgeon | February 29th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

Rick, I’m curious to know how you would go about determining whether or not a click is fraudulent. I am a programmer also. There are certainly ways to determine whether or not a click comes from a particular IP address, or has occurred repeatedly over a particular time period, and so forth, but does this mean all of those clicks are fraudulent? And in the case of clicks that are automatically generated to look like they were produced by well-intentioned human beings, how do you distinguish those from the fraudulent clicks?

It’s like the spam problem. Sites are blocked because they are deemed to be spam generators, or vulnerable to spam, but does that mean all email generated from such sites is spam? Certainly, there are numerous incidents where people have found their emails were blocked for no good reason, and it was necessary for their recipients to enter the blocked addresses into whitelists in order that the mail would go into the recipients’ inboxes, instead of spam folders (or worse, outright dropped).
16. craig | March 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 am

Once locked into PPC, there is no escape

Craig
http://www.theprintedbagshop.co.uk
17. Blogging guides by san | March 11th, 2008 at 2:18 am

great piece of advice I will keep them in mind next time.