Sorry about the PPC activity; but i just cannot believe AWin felt the need to click on your ads.

A tech (in fact my nan) would know that you only have to copy the link location via your right hand clicking the mouse to find out the tracking links. Obviously some affiliates hide/mask the URL, but most don’t and I’m pretty positive your advert would have said ShopCodes.co.uk – so there was now need to click.

Plus surely the tech can spot what keyword you are bidding on, because they are in bold. if Dixons was not in bold print on google results, then you did not use the keyword dixons. If it was, then rightly you should get a warning to stop this activity.

I’d ask for your money back. PPC can be very effective if you use the negative matching and Geo etc.; so i’d try again but may be negative match Awin merchants so you dont get the same thing happening.

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Or how about this?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=+&adtest=on

Or how about this?

The firefox plugin which Gav created.

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=adwords+preview&category=all&country=all&language=all&submitform=Search&sherlock=yes&opensearch=yes

Paul

I’m afraid that this was all a case of bad timing. Following activity over the weekend, we had a conversation with Dixons about affiliates’ ads appearing on voucher code terms relating to their brand. This includes things like [dixons discount codes], [dixsons voucher codes], and so on. Over the weekend a few affiliates had begun to appear on these terms, which is a contravention of the Dixons programme terms and conditions. In pretty much every case I’m sure this is down to broadmatching and over-enthusiastic search engines, possibly combined with these affiliates increasing their paid search spend for the big Christmas rush.

We gave a list of the key terms to a new member of our team to investigate. For each keyword, we asked them to provide the affiliate ID so we could get in touch with these affiliates and work with them on avoiding these terms.

I asked one of our techies to have a look through our firewall log to find out where this activity took place, and it was all tracked back to this member of staff’s computer. I’m happy to send you over a screenshot of this so you can take a look if you would like. Our member of staff was working through the terms and checking for affiliate IDs.

One thing I wanted to reassure everyone about was that these clicks were not caused by our brand monitoring tool, Snoopy. We have an arrangement with Google meaning that all activity by Snoopy is completely discounted from billing and account details.

It was really unfortunate that your first day of paid search coincided with us checking through these terms on Dixons.

We advise that all new campaigns avoid these key terms for paid search, along the lines of [dixons voucher codes].

I know Shopcodes does really well in natural listings for this kind of term anyway, and luckily there’s are far fewer broadmatching obstacles in SEO!

Thanks

Julia

After our discussion yesterday, I went and checked on my stats following your alarming screen print showing AWin happy clicking affiliates PPC Ads.

Sadly I have found the same thing happened to me on a number of occassions also. Personally I think this is wrong on AWins behalf. Adverts have a show URL and therefore, the network should be typing in URL rather than costing us money and screwing around with out stats.

I understand they may need to click once or twice but my stats mirror yours and personally I find this extremely excessive. Have you mentioned it to AWin yet? I haven’t but will be when I get a minute to gather my evidence.

I personally haven’t ever done any PPC which has always lead me to wonder if I should be. The fact is though that things are going well as they are so I think I’ll be sticking to my non-PPC policy.