I am running google ads and having invalid click issues my ad serve only in Dubai, problem i face my competitor click bomb my ad from UK, FRACE and other countries mostly from Europe and Britain, I excluded all the world expect Dubai but my competitor still able to see my ad and clicking them with some kind of bot till Dawn to Dusk.
I talked with google and they said our system filter invalid clicks but still 30 to 50 percent clicks google consider legit.
I come up with a solution by installing a plugin in WordPress and filtering traffic by filtering URL with "/?gclid=" parameter. But now I have to do it manually.
My question is there any automate rule in WordPress so I can block an IP address automatically if he click on my ad more then a couple of times.
Wouldn't you consider this more a google ads problem than a webmaster problem? Your take to approach google is the best one imo.
Google ads should not count a person twice if the click on the same add twice in a row within a certain time period (from the same ip address) and this should be your argument with google. This logic is simple enough so that google ads should have it in order to ensure fair business even from google's perspective.
If you succeed with this, your competitor will think he is successful while doing you no harm.
Trying to block those ip addresses can again be bypassed by your competitor with the next version of his clickbomb trick.
Related
I currently manage quite a few Google Analytics accounts for different websites and am trying to work out how to remove certain Anayltics spam from these accounts. I have previously added filters like excluding Russia visitors as the businesses are local UK based but I am now getting a lot of traffic from:
Language - not set
&
Page - sharebutton.to
If i was to exlucde the above would that get rid of any actual visitors as well as spam or will it get rid of 100% spam?
If someone could help with this that would be brilliant.
Many Thanks
Paul
Filters based on countries or the name of the spam are not efficient because both can be easily changed by the spammers.
Also, it isn't possible to filter the (not set) entries in Analytics, this label is added after the visit is recorded when Analytics doesn't find a value for that dimension.
Instead what you should use
One hostname filter, this will help prevent the majority of the spam, whether it shows as referral, page, language, etc. and independently of the name used by the spammer.
A source filter for the sneaky crawlers which are far less frequent.
Here you will find detailed instructions on how to create the hostname filter and other measures you can take to prevent fake traffic.
Like many others I suffered the fake referrals and spam stuff in my google analytics, I have put all the relevant filters in place and read the forums and tips, etc.
Everything seemed to settle down, but now I can see big spikes in real-time visits, like 25/35 all at once, just showing landing on my homepage, there is no 'fake' address showing up like before (free-share-buttons, you-porn.ga etc), nothing, just multiple visits all at once, the locations are spread across the world, but mostly in the USA, this seems to be happening once a day from what I can tell. What is causing this?
I'm actually at the point where I'm thinking, GA not even worth bothering with for a small business like mine, frustrating and just seem to be wasting precious time on stuff like this.
Fake direct visits are the latest form of attack from ghost spam, especially from free-share-buttons. If you catch it in real time you will see that this spammer(might be others) makes 1 referral hit with multiple fake direct visits (10 or more) at the same time.
The problem with the conventional methods is that they were excluding the source, in this case, the referrals, and while the referral will still be stopped, the fake direct visit will go through.
Fortunately, there is a way to prevent the direct visits along with the referral and any ghost spam form for that matter, like organic or pages.
What all ghost spam have in common is that they use a fake or not set hostname. Based on this if you create a filter that will include only valid hostnames you will get rid of all fake direct visits and ghost referrals with one filter.
You can find more information on these related questions about this issue and the valid hostname solution
https://stackoverflow.com/a/30470413/3197362
https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
I have been asked to provide recommendations on "Verified Analytics" for the next iteration of my company's site. Verified to mean that when we sell ad space, it's based on a number of page-views, and the people who buy that space want a way to verify that the numbers we give them are the actual numbers we're delivering.
I have turned to The Google and the only services I can find for this sort of thing revolve around Google Analytics and the sale of a domain name. I export my analytics numbers to a PDF, have Google email the PDF to my auctioneer, and they look for signs of tampering. If no signs of tampering are found they put a little "Verified" badge on the domain auction. (Here)
Other than this, and something similar on another domain sales site, I haven't found anything like what I've been asked to find.
Currently we are using Google Analytics, however I've been also asked to recommend a replacement for that based on the ability to be verified. I'd rather just stick with Google Analytics since we also use Google for advertising.
Google analytics is a third party service, so you can't modify the stats data yourself anyway. If google is sending them the report directly there's not even scope for you to be editing the numbers so their concern is more paranoia than reasonable.
a) You can add another user in google analytics and give them report-only access. This way they can look at the stats themselves.
b) Add another hits tracking service such as http://www.hitslink.com/ and give the client access to these reports too.
Quantcast / Comscore / Compete all make estimates of site traffic based on limited amounts of data. As an ad buyer I would never take these stats as proof of anything really.
Online Audience Measurement is a term to search for - you're looking at providers like Quantcast, Comscore or Compete. These work alongside, rather than replace your current web analytics package.
Qauntcast actually measures traffic directly. You insert a tag, same as Google Analytics. Most ad agencies and advertisers accept Quantcast numbers for traffic validation.
It seems that each time I see an ad that is served by an ad manager application there is always a bunch of parameters added to the URL of the product.
Say for instance one random stackoverflow ad :
http://ads.stackoverflow.com/a.aspx?Task=Click&ZoneID=4&CampaignID=474&AdvertiserID=5&BannerID=408&SiteID=1&RandomNumber=464183249&Keywords=
or this one:
http://ads.stackoverflow.com/a.aspx?Task=Click&ZoneID=4&CampaignID=474&AdvertiserID=5&BannerID=408&SiteID=1&RandomNumber=2039490120&Keywords=http-1.1%2ccaching%2ccache%2chttp-header-fields%2cheader%2cx-user-registered
If I go with the logic of the things, when you register a click to a banner, you would normally need a few info : "how many times it has been clicked", "by who" (ip/registered account/...), "when".
Now if we look at the parameters there are a lot more informations to this. OpenX adds a lot more on top of that :
http://ox.jeuxonline.info/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2&bannerid=244&zoneid=7&cb=1264705683&maxdest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smartadserver.com%2Fcall%2Fcliccommand%2F3141468%2F1264705683
The only reason I can think of this is to save call to the db, other than that I really can't see.
Any hint or ideas ?
Tracking.
The parameters are used to identify you, where you're clicking from, what you're clicking on, which ad campaign your click should go to, etc.
Usually ad requests contain a size code, sometimes a location code (where on the page the ad appears), and audience segmentation information, which is information the content provider knows (or has guessed) about you and is used by the network to figure out what kinds of ads should be served to you. Most audience segmentation is proprietary, either to the ad network or to the content provider. Some ad networks have special features to support segmentation based on content you've recently searched for (keywords, search_terms, etc.).
Most of the time the name/value pairs will be completely unintelligible to people not familiar with the segmentation rules. You could have something like il=5, which could mean income level is in category 5, which might mean $120,000/yr on some arbitrary network.
The actual image served may repeat some of the information in the original ad request, either for tracking actual ads served or, in some cases, because the image server needs some of the same information to serve the right image.
Well they also need to give analytics to their advertisers. You'll see that the URL identifies who the advertiser is, what campaign it's for, etc. All that stuff is used to know who to bill, and how effective the ad is (ie is the picture of the girl more effective then the unicorn).
We have some third parties that are sending us traffic and have asked us to put a tracking pixel on the confirmation page so they can track through the sales.
We are currently using Google analytics for our own usage.
Google will remember the original referral through cookies. This may be a good or bad thing. If someone purchases through company B's link but they had originally found our site through company A - then company A still gets the 'referal'. That doesn't seem fair, but it seems to be the way google analytics works:
For example, if this is the user's
first visit to your site, the tracking
code will add the campaign tracking
information to the cookie. If the user
previously found and visited your
site, the tracking code increments the
session counter in the cookie.
Regardless of how many sessions or how
much time has passed, Google Analytics
"remembers" the original referral.
This gives Analytics true
multi-session tracking capability.
Currently we only have one tracking pixel on our 'receipt page' from a company that we're not even doing business with. Having a second company ask me for us to add one makes me thing 'wait a minute - we're going to suddenly be inundated with these things!'. Plus it means someone can look at the source and see all the people we do business with.
This isn't Oprah - you cant ALL have tracking pixels. Right ?
How should we manage sales from multiple traffic sources in the most honest way for both sides - especially if they already have a system set up that they insist on using?
Here's how I solved the problem at our company: we gave our partners a URL that has a parameter in the query string. This parameter triggers a cookie. On the "goal"/confirmation page (where the tracking pixel is usually inserted), we insert some logic to see if the cookie value is correlated with a one of our recognized partners (chained if-else or switch statement). If a match is found, then the tracking pixel is displayed.
Even though you asked this question a while ago, I hope that this still helps you or someone else with the same problem!