Click Fraud

Click Fraud is when someone who is selling you internet advertising on a pay-per-click basis enhances the number of clicks you get on your ad themselves in order to charge you more money.

Does AT&T engage in this fraudulent practice?

My husband owns a small contracting business in Los Angeles. For the past 25 years he has advertised in the yellow pages. Recently it didn't seem to be worth it anymore. We told our representative that we wanted to pull our ads that we were spending $2,500 per month on.

Robert Gray, the regional sales manager offered us the following deal:

AT&T would run our print ads for FREE in the yellow pages books. Zero money: $0 if we would contract with them to run an online advertising program for us. According to Bob Gray AT&T is the biggest reseller of google adwords so they get a crazy cheap rate from google. The deal was that we purchase a $2,500 per month pay-per-click program from AT&T an get the print advertising for free. The internet advertising would appear mostly as google ads and some yahoo and bing ads.

Claim 1.    My online advertising started August 27th. In less than a month I could see that there was click fraud going on. My AT&T ads were being clicked on from "local directories" in Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, & Oregon even though they were only supposed to be appearing in my local area which is a 16 mile radius from our business.


From: Lisa

Date: September 21, 2010 4:06:22 PM PDT
To: TERRANCE C, Michael C 

Subject: reporting

Hi Terry, Michael, Bob Gray and Mr Drake, (Terry will you forward for me to B.G. and Mr. Drake)

I'm looking at my awstats and they show 33 visits to my page from marchex
yet marchex is counting referrals from them at 88. What does this mean?
I also have google analytics which tells me that my ads are being shown on such pages as:
liststoclick.com
localdirectory.azcentral.com (arizona)
mississippisearches.com (mississippi)
newhampshiresearches.com (new hampshire)
oregonsearches.com (oregon)
Perhaps marchex is more interested in getting clicks than customers for me because these are all out of my area. And "lists to click?" they aren't even pretending they are a search engine, just a place to use up people's advertising dollars.

I have 96 referred searches all together according to my google analytics account and 36 of these are from sites like angieslist.com that I advertise separately with.
so there is absolutely NO WAY that 88 clicks could have come through marchex for me.
I'm sure you understand that when I look at the numbers and do the math I begin to feel very mistrustful of the information I am getting from marchex and consequently from AT&T.

At this point I don't know how you can bill me in good conscience for anything. You have run ads that I didn't ask for and that I disapproved of the minute I saw them.

No offense intended. It is hard to start a new business and you are a huge mountain to move but  you do not seem to have yourselves together enough at AT&T to be able to offer the web advertising package you contracted to provide me with. You are a great yellow pages directory. But not that adept at internet advertising YET.

I'm sorry to tell you that the yellowpages.com ad, which is supposedly a $500 per month value, has provided me with 2 clicks this whole month. Two clicks! And I probably am the clicker!
At this point I would rather just deal directly with google. That way I could have my ads up correctly today. I have given you a 4 week chance to provide the services you obligated yourself to provide and you haven't. Summer is waning and it is imperitive that my advertising dollars give me results yesterday.

How do you want to proceed? As far as I am concerned you have broken the contract we have.
I really don't want to slog through a whole year of mistrust and ineptitude, unreturned calls and no response to emails. Would you like to cancel this contract and maybe in the future we can resume a business relationship that will benefit both of us? That is what I'd like to do.

The internet advertising is a fiasco. It is NOT WORKING.

 I realize you believe yourself to have given me a value in the directory with the "free" print ads. As far as I'm concerned, I paid full price for those ads last year and didn't get much in the way of results. I think it is fair for you to run them for "free" this year anyway.

I really do like you guys though and hope that when you get your act together and provide the services you are charging for we can work together again. As of now I want to cancel our contract.

We still have other directories coming up that we can work a deal on and there is always the future when I'm sure you will get all the kinks worked out on your google campaigns.

Let me know how you want to proceed.
Thanks,
Lisa

Claim 2.     I have statistics from my website hosting company about every visitor who comes to my site. The name of their statistics is Awstats and they track every visitor and where they come from, how long they stay on my site, how many pages they look at and other valuable information. I also have independent statistics about the visitors to my site provided by google Analytics. Analytics also gives information about how many people have come to the site, how long they stayed, how many pages they looked at. The statistics provided by AT&T on the other hand provide only a number of clicks that I am being billed for. Here you see that on September 6th-28th I was billed for 134 clicks from AT&T:



At first it seems like we are doing okay. But my Analytics account gives me more detailed information. And the first 4 referring websites are all advertisements that I pay separately for. They are not AT&T pay-per-click responses. Neither is number 6, yellowpages.com that is a separate $500 value. So they charged me for 134 clicks and Out of 170 visits there were only 113 that were potentially billable. AT&T billed me for at least 20% more clicks than they could possibly have provided.





When you bill someone for a service you didn't actually provide what is that called? Stealing? Fraud?

If it's not that please explain to me what it is. I have asked over and over.

As far as number 7, crowdflower.com tell me if you think I should be billed for clicks from this site. AT&T charged me for the clicks.

Claim 3.    Below is a screenshot from the "referring site" crowdflower.com that AT&T billed me for. Please let me know if you think I should be charged for advertising clicks from this site. It looks like click fraud to me. AT&T has never explained why I was billed for these clicks, maybe you will:



Here is the next page of the "referring" site. Is this legitimate advertising? Should AT&T be billing me for these clicks?

 My agreement with AT&T was that we would be advertising to potential customers who were searching for services we provide, not people who are being paid to click on a company website. I was concerned right away and wrote many many emails and made many phone calls to find out why there was such a huge billing descrepancy. Some time they would bill us for 40% or 50% more clicks than we were getting.




Claim 4.     Many of my clicks continued to come from outside my service area. If you were to search google for electricians in Huntington Beach which is 28 miles out of our service area you would see AT&T's pay per click ad on the right side of the page second one down under the map. Click Fraud. Again, our agreement was that our ads were going to be targeted to our potential customers. Not people in other States or Counties.



Below you can see that my Analytics reveals 15 visits from people who searched for an electrician in Huntington Beach. I don't think I should be billed for these visits and I don't intend to pay for those visits. Our agreement was to advertise in our area exclusively.

And what about the 213 clicks I was billed for this month from adservoces10.enhance.com?



Claim 5.     AT&T was billing me for clicks from, Marchex,  the company they hired to manage my pay-per-click account.
See the accounting below where AT&T bills me for 171 clicks in the week Nov 1 - Nov 7:




My analytics account shows only 114 clicks during the same exact time period. And the strange thing is that 48 of the clicks come from the exact same website: adservices10.enhance.com Of course I was curious about a site I'd never heard of that so many Los Angeles homeowners would visit in one week search for the handful of services we provide.



Oddly, there is no way to get to that website. If you type the address adservices10.enhance.com into your navigation bar you will be forwarded directly to the site pictured below:



Maria, If you don't think this is fraud then please explain to me what it is. Certainly if there is a reasonable explanation for these discrepancies then a customer who is being billed $2,500 per month should have their concerns addressed.

No one has answered me. Every single person who has promised to get to the bottom of this for me has not returned my calls or emails  or given any explanation. Here is the email Steve Tate wrote me after months of "getting to the bottom of this":


Finally today, you opened a "claim" and have assured me that you are the judge and jury and have complete power find out exactly what happened and to cancel the charges completely.

We have proven ourselves to be people who pay for our advertising. Over the last 10 years we have spent over $300,000 advertising with AT&T and I would have been happy to pay for honestly delivered pay-per-click services. But AT&T did NOT deliver the services they contracted to provide. Marchex has engaged in some of the most deceitful fraudulent practices I've ever encountered in my years of buying advertising. Instead of threatening me, AT&T should be thanking me for exposing the click-fraud that Marchex is perpetrating. I can only surmise that the reason AT&T is stonewalling me is because they are in agreement with everything that Marchex has done.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Lisa