Google Adwords: WordScam?

Dallas, TXMarc McKinney and his sunglass company bought into Google's adwords when it was fairly new, back in July of 2005. "We only had a small budget—we stuck our big toe in," says McKinney. "We had success for about three weeks, then something unusual happened..."

McKinney's company got involved in Google adwords on the advice of their webmaster. "Our budget was only $10 per day but we were doing well," says McKinney. "However, after the initial 3 weeks, we got click-throughs to the site but no sales and our $10 a day was burnt up in the first half of the month. That may sound strange but our webmaster explained that one of our competitors could be burning up our budget in the first two weeks of every month.

"For the adwords we used, we were in the top three sites of every category—that is how new it was. (Now adwords is out of control.) Now, you would have to spend a lot more money to get to the top three. (Let me explain what I mean about the top three: when you look at the right hand side of a sight, our sponsor link would be one of the top three on that page. And we would have 10 different keyword phrases such as cycling eyewear, tennis sunglasses, running sunglasses.)

Most people have limits, but the red flag waved when Google emailed us and said we weren't spending enough money. They said we had to double our ad budget to stay onboard for the entire month because we had so many click-through's in the first half of the month.

We tried Google for five months.

I don't have any hard proof that we were scammed but I can't think of another explanation. We continued to sell sunglasses but they weren't being sourced from Google.

There is now a software program you can buy that will automatically click through to your competitor's site and use up the competitor's ad budget. Google claims that they have spamware to eliminate that from occurring...

Remember the 'click through fraud' lawsuit against Google that was settled for $20 million? A clothing business company filed a class action suit and won.
During this time, in the fall of 2005, I tried to contact Google but the company just referred me (by email) to a blog that discussed click-through fraud. It's the same with adwords.

I think we wasted about $1,500 on adwords. It isn't big but it was huge to us. We are a small company and this ate up our entire advertising budget.
I have not reactivated my account and haven't gone to adwords for more than two years. This scam isn't hurting Google; adwords work if you don't hook into this fraud thing. They just have to figure out a way to eliminate overcharging adwords."