Google Adds Invalid Click Reports but What For?

Google annouced yesterday via Adwords Blog, that there is a “new tool” in your account that will show you in real time the number of ivalid clicks that affect your account. I use the term “tool” loosely even though industry experts around the web have dubbed it “Google’s Click Fraud tool.”

While I don’t consider it a “tool” but more of an interesting peice of data. I don’t see how this “tool” in it’s current form can help manage any accounts, sure it provides an interesting piece of data but it is more of a report then a tool. What this report does is show you the number of invlaid clicks as determined by Google’s measures and the percentage of clicks that are “invalid”. The good about this report is it provides a warm fuzzy feeling to advertisers who no longer have to just take Google’s word for it when they have said ‘yes, these clicks happen but you arent charged for them.’ That is about the extent of the good as far as I can see it. To really make this report useful they should allow you to break it down to the keyword level rather then just the account and campaign levels.

By seeing invalid clicks on a keyword level basis I believe it will allow advertisers to see which words drive the most click fraud in their account. Here is an example: if the highest traffic keyword in our account gets 100 clicks per day and Google catches 10 (also the most of any keyword in the account) of them as invalid, I would presume that there is more click fraud happening on this highly competitive keyword and may want to adjust my bids accordingly.

A setup like this would really make this interesting but as it stands right now, this “tool” is exactly not a tool and mildly helpful. Google needs to break out this report with more information on keyword activity, network activity (content or search) and even time of day activity. Although there have been click fraud reports that estimate click fraud around 12-15% I firmly believe that the majority of click fraud comes from Google’s Adsense network and if they seperated this report out to search and content network I’d bet we’d see a large percentage of “invalid clicks” coming from the content network.

Why not givs us more data Google? If you really care about your advertisers and are confident in your click fraud measures, give us more data, I challenge you to!

To see this report for yourself
Log into your Google Adwords account
Click on the Reports tab
Create a new report
Select Account Performance or Campaign Performance report
Click on Advanced Options
Select Invalid Clicks and Invalid Clicks Rate

Fill in the rest of the report info
Run the report
and your results should look similar to the one below