My post last week talked about some simple research I do weekly on companies who click on my PPC ads. My goal is to find out how many times competitors click on our ad. Yesterday, the Google Adwords blog posted a good article on their extensive click-fraud detection methods. The article is worth your time and goes into pretty good detail.
One thing I did not mention on my original post which I should have is Google’s Invalid Clicks report in the Reports section of the Adwords interface. I use this often because I get a good idea of the rate of invalid clicks on my campaign. The screen shot below shows where to indicate you want those stats in your report.
There are a lot of click services available online now. Any competitors can simply engage such service to make fraud clicks to your site with the aim of getting your site off the ad network.