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Nasty Business: How To Drain Competitors' Google AdWords Budgets
tsu doh nimh (609154) writes KrebsOnSecurity looks at a popular service that helps crooked online marketers exhaust the Google AdWords budgets of their competitors.The service allows companies to attack competitors by raising their costs or exhausting their ad budgets early in the day. Advertised on YouTube and run by a guy boldly named "GoodGoogle," the service employs a combination of custom software and hands-on customer service, and promises clients the ability to block the appearance of competitors' ads. From the story: "The prices range from $100 to block between three to ten ad units for 24 hours to $80 for 15 to 30 ad units. For a flat fee of $1,000, small businesses can use GoodGoogle's software and service to sideline a handful of competitors' ads indefinitely."
Hey, so I don't get to see those "your content will play in 5 seconds" prompts if I use their service? Cool!
I block all ads and have for the better part of a decade. Too many worries about malware, improper handling of info, tracking, you name it. It's a bad business model, anyway. I not met too many true geeks who feel much differently. If someone's business is built on something that can be manipulated and blocked so easily, the business model sucks to be sure.
If I can trace that this attack-company is attacking my ads because my competitor paid them to do so, I would think that would be evidence that my competitor is liable for anti-competitive action. I imagine this is likely to be easily trace-able.
With Tor and all thems type of technologies, something like this could probably be quite difficult to trace. But, that is assuming that this attack-company has gone through the effort to make things difficult to trace. When I find scenarios where a company could invest in doing things in an effective way, or may just try to do things simply and cheaply and ineffectively but still sounds good on the surface (when marketing the services), I usually find that security and intelligent design and other good and useful things have been neglected.
Rather than pay one of these scumbags of ill repute, I'd rather focus on improving my own business's image. If the other guy can make a buck or two as well, that may help to grow interest in our industry. And when I've collected a few bucks of my own, I can stop the other guy from competing against me by buying him out. Works out well for me. Works out well enough for my competitor. Doesn't work for scumbags who act as dealers of virtual arms, hoping that I waste my efforts trying to hurt the other guy.
But, I do know that not everyone shares my positive views in life.
KrebsOnSecurity looks at a popular service that helps crooked
Helping crooks is popular? That is just sad. Very, very, very sad.
Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.
If your intention is to advertise only to the US market, which is what I assume from your example, you're doing it wrong if you are even showing AdWords to audiences in Europe. Unless, of course, they are using a VPN or proxy or other means to browse with a US-based IP address.
Heck, you can target down to individual zipcodes, Congressional districts, counties, Metro areas, and a bunch more ways. No excuse other than ignorance if you or your clients ads are running in an entirely different continent.
If you want your ads for your US company to appear in Europe as well as in USA, then you need to create a sufficient AdWords daily budget, plus perhaps do time of day targeting. Or to be better at it, have separate AdWords campaigns for each geo, with separate budgets, even if you're using the same ads.
There's a lot I don't like about AdWords, including how Google loves to split functionality into different menus and services and levels of products to create massive confusion about how to use them. Like WTF isn't there one single thing that has all my ad budgets, my analytics, my webmaster tools, my everything-about-it, all in one damn place? Or to use another, non-ads example, Google Voice can be used as VOIP from a computer, but only by a not-well-explained combo of Google Voice + Google Chat + Gmail page + Google Talk plugin, something no non-technical "normal person" will ever discover. Some of that dysfunctional UX comes from Google's only-engineers culture, but on the advertising products I think some of it is also deliberate ambiguity so you will inadvertantly spend more. Same reason that in USA and many other jurisdictions, Google will not let you prepay for a fixed spend, only postpay - they like that you can't quite control it, and the house always has the edge.
But they do provide geotargeting tools, rather good ones. So no excuse if your ads are running in the wrong locales.
That doesn't make the sleazy service abusing AdWords any less evil themselves. But if the ads are eaten up by wrong geolocations, whether from that sleazy service or just from legitimate browsing clicks in the wrong countries, that is the advertiser's own fault for not using the control Google gives them.
What would happen with say, a firefox add-on which did the opposite: Generate a large number of fake clicks in short time with the intention of getting someone booted from Adsense( or whatever)?
Wikipedia is aware of the existence of joe jobs in click fraud: see Click fraud#Non-contracting parties. Google is supposed to be able to detect this. And apparently AdSense publishers who become the victim of such a joe job are supposed to report this to AdSense staff. But like you, I'm not certain as to how Google's response to such problem reports can scale.
You should have to worry about not being sure. Just look at your conversion rates. While it is hard to identify how many of your sales you would have gotten anyway without AdWords, it is very easy to tell how many of your AdWords customers are actually purchasing anyway. And the last time I worked for an e-commerce site was 2008, I'm pretty confident that their analytic tools have improved since then.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It's the Free Market (TM) at work, doing God's Work (TM)! Why do yuo hate America!?!?!?
C|N>K
...only if it's in Google's interest to block services like this instead of asking the victim to pay more money.
It is. If AdWords fail to provide a reasonable return people will stop using them and the price will drop significantly, cutting into Google's revenue. It's definitely in Google's best long term interest to stop this kind of thing.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You (and Greyfox) do not seem to understand what Google Ads are. They are, for the most part, not the display advertisements one tends to see on websites. Instead, they are textual only and associated with search or with websites that open up space on their site for text ads.
Ad Blocking software allows them to show and always has. And that is because they are unobtrusive and not annoying.
All of my browsers have some kind of ad-block technology in them. And the Google text ads show just fine, thank you.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Businesses A and B don't want each other on Google. Both use the service. Neither were seen again. Winner? Middleman, the service.
1) This service will survive for all of two weeks tops - it's him against the collective power of Google. I put my money on Google.
And if that were the matchup, I'd agree. But remember Google is an enormous company, with many problems. This is a minor little annoying fly buzzing around the office. If the fly lies low, it can survive for quite a while. If it bites the wrong person, or becomes too annoying, it's going to get swatted rather quickly.
So far it looks like the fly has managed to lie low enough to not be much of a concern (The article mentions the service has been around for 2 1/2 years).
AccountKiller