I’m not sure if this is equivalent to fraud. But I’ve recently discovered that 99.9% of the website visitors to my new startup’s website are just random @gmail addresses from India and China - most of which are coming from Google ads. We don’t spend much, about $100/m mostly to keep our #1 ranking in Google (which I think helps), but it does seem fraudulent. If I turn the ads off, the traffic from those IPs drops off a cliff.
With Google ads you can select the countries where you want the ads to run in. If you go worldwide and chose to maximize clicks, Google Ads will mainly run them in India and other emerging countries because it's much cheaper to get clicks from there.
I also had a small Google ad spend ($350 over 3 weeks), that I setup to run exclusively in the USA, and had the same experience where IP addresses recorded by hotjar were all from India, all new signups from the ad spend were '.gmail' email addresses and although I had about 100 signups not a single one entered a credit card.
Yeah, same here. We have done some spam mitigation, but we still get so many bogus sign ups and form submissions. In this instance, who is committing the fraud? Is it Google to ensure you spend your entire budget? I don’t see anyone else benefiting from these bots and click farms. We’re so small and new that it can’t be a competitor.
Almost the same here. Had an Google Ads budget of $200 a month. All I got from this were dubious sign ups, which all together never looked around in the application and never came back. As my ROI turned to be negative, I turned off ads completely. My organic sign-ups even increased since that. And those people are staying!
Google Ads default settings for location targeting is based on "Presence or interest" in a location, not whether the user is actually in the targeted country. That means even if you have "United States" selected as your target, your ads will still show mostly to people outside the US who "show interest in" the US.
To fix it: Campaign Settings > Location > Location Options, and under "Target" select "Presence". Never use the default "Presence or interest" option, as it will result in exactly the scenario you're describing.
This is my #1 pet peeve with Google Ads. Using the default setting is an incredibly common (and expensive) mistake people make setting up new campaigns.
By default Google will show ads to people in or "intersted in" the selected location. You can change this to only show ads to people actually present in the specified location, from campaign level location targeting. I spend low 5 figures per month on ads and changing this parameter has significantly reduced poor quality clicks.
I've been suspicious of this in my own campaigns as well. Google Ads lets you drill down to specific cities where your ads were clicked. Very often, Ashburn Virginia shows up very high on the list. Ashburn is where AWS's us-east region lives, and presumably also where many VPNs operate out of.
I simply ended up excluding Ashburn from our campaigns for this reason.
