Google Adds Click Fraud Reporting to AdWords

In an effort to become more transparent with the actual click filtering that Google AdWords is performing, AdWords has launched two new options in the reporting features – invalid clicks and invalid click through rate. Now, it is possible for you to tell how many clicks your ad received which you were not billed for.

It will still not be possible to tie filtering to a keyword, AdGroup, or ad copy due to the additional data only being available in a couple of reports. The most common reasons I’d expect to hear from Google about why they would be showing reports in this manner is so that one can not reverse engineer their system to create malicious click fraud programs.

It is important to note that the invalid click columns are only available on the following reports:

Account Performance
Campaign Performance

And only if the View is not hourly (i.e. any summary of day to year is available).

The available time frame for the invalid click reports are only January 1, 2006 to present. Therefore, one can not audit an account from the past years. This could be due to how the data is collected, or due to the outstanding class action law suit and not wanting to give away too much information about that period of time.

In addition, one can not run a report that includes both ad distribution and invalid clicks. Quite interesting that Google does not give the ability to see the invalid click levels of search versus content. This could be to protect their publishers or for other reasons in keeping a level of ambiguity about their content network.

The level of transparency in welcome, and will allow one to see how many of their Google clicks AdWords is filtering out before being charged. This will help to correlate actual reported clicks from AdWords with one’s Analytics system to see how close the two different systems come to agreeing on the actual visitor numbers.

Invalid Click Report for an account:

Year	Account	Clicks	Invalid Clicks	Invalid Clicks Rate
2006		1,114,507	43,205	3.73%
Totals and Overall Averages:		1,114,507	43,205	3.73%

Here’s the ad distribution for those clicks:

Year	Ad Distribution	Clicks
2006	Search Only	855,574
2006	Content Only	258,973
Totals and Overall Averages:		1,114,507

It would be very interesting to see the invalid click report by distribution type. Maybe, I’ll go back and see what accounts have dedicated content versus search campaigns and run these reports at the campaign level to see some data.

To run an invalid click report, follow these steps:

Log into your Google Account
Navigate to the ‘reports’ tab
Select ‘Account Performance or ‘Campaign Performance as the report type
Select anything except hourly as the View
Select a date range that does not go back further than 01/01/2006
Run the report

Overall, I’m very happy Google AdWords has moved to this level of transparency. It will be interesting to see if this sets an industry trend with Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing following Google’s lead.

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