Adwatcher – Adwords Click Fraud Monitor – Update

So, after a short couple days of testing Adwatcher, it has already detected over 300+ fraudulent clicks. It's actually quite interesting to see.

There are a couple main things that I really like about this program so far.

The first is that I think I found a competitors IP address. How do I know? Well, one person had clicked on my ads (and I had been charged) 22 times. That's right, one person clicked 22 times. I wont say how much I lost from that amount of clicks but it's significant enough for me to want to do something about it. So now that I have the information that they were probably researching my keywords, I want to prevent them from accessing my page.

What do I do? Hehehe...

I add that IP address into the Hosts.deny file and now that competitor cannot access my site anymore.

So far adwatcher has proven to be pretty useful but it does seem like a lot of work.

The process for getting your money back for fraud clicks seems to be like pulling teeth. A close friend of mine used adwatcher a couple months back and canceled his account because he never got any money back from Google. Knowing this, I wanted to make this work. I wanted to follow all the directions to make sure that I got paid for clicks that I didn't really need to pay for.

After reading all the steps you have to take, I'm wondering if it will be worth all the effort. I spend tens of thousands of dollars but really I doubt adwords is going to credit me back for people who click just 5 times (which is adwatchers default alert level).

All in all, so far it's helped me discover a few things but I'm not quite sure it's worth the $50 just yet.

What I have done:
To eliminate google complaining to me about wanting money back for what they will probably call "valid" clicks, I've raised my fraud limit up just a bit. That way it takes more clicks on the same ad to "trip" the fraud protector.

If the amount I save is $1000 or more, I will continue with adwatcher. If I make less than that or I dont get the credits back, then I'll be canceling.