Bad AdWords Experience

[Home_Based_Mom]

I recently began receiving Content Network clicks from http://ads.cnn.com/yada-yada-yada-a-mil ... -different. When I clicked on any of the links they always were from a page that was nothing but 4 AdSense ads - never mine so I guess they rotate?

Yesterday morning the number began increasing exponentially (or so it seemed), but as the resulting AdSense income was about one third of the expense I banned "http://ads.cnn.com/" and thinking that was that, ran some errands.

Silly me. That did not even begin to be that. I came home to find hundreds - hundreds of clicks (at my expense, of course) from the url I had just banned!

I panicked, paused everything, and tried to solve things through Google's chat. Not helpful. The person on the other end - foreign name so I don't know if if I was dealing with male or female - ran reports that never got better than 2 days old. He/she kept insisting that Google's technology would catch any bogus clicks before I was charged. He/she just couldn't seem to understand that I had already been charged. I provided the number of impressions, number of clicks, which campaign, dollar damage, etc., but it was not on the report he/she pulled (cuz it ended 2 days earlier) so he/she never understood. He/she said I should contact the "Click Quality Team."

The problem with that (and notifying the AdSense side of things as well) is the messages bounce back into my email inbox because they want the url's of all the suspected offenders, which are all different, so long and so numerous that the character count Google allows is far exceeded.

So my campaigns are all paused and I am increasing Yahoo and MSN.

What a major hassle.

Anybody else ever had a mess like this?

Sandi

[Lynn Terry]

Ouch Sandy - no, I've never experienced anything like that. Were they able to get it resolved for you?

[Home_Based_Mom]

No.

First they said everything was "normal." I pointed out that getting ten times the clicks I "normally" get in a month within a 2-3 hour window, especially from a site I had excluded, was not "normal" to me.

We went back and forth a bit and they eventually said the extra clicks probably resulted from ads on a site that was featured on or linked to from a popular blog somewhere. That part made sense.

Then they said I should have blocked "cnn.com/" rather than the actual url the ads came from which was "ads.cnn.com/". My take on that is I am not psychic and how was I supposed to know that?

The whole fiasco cost 3 times in AdWords what I made back in AdSense, and resulted in no additional income whatsoever. Because there is no way I can prevent something similar from happening again, the campaigns are staying paused indefinitely.

I need to work on some other way to get traffic. Sure wish I had a better handle on SEO!

Sandi

[Lynn Terry]

[Home_Based_Mom]

Thanks!

I have been reading through some of what is posted there. I also get newsletters from Perry Marshall and Derek Gehl and am really trying to absorb what they say.

I always sounds so easy but never quite works out that way!

Sandi