Manipulation of Google AdWords content cost

[Numbat]

This just occurred to me...

Say you're an advertiser with AdWords. You're paying a lot of money for ads on the content network. Your money is going mostly to a few sites, which you manage to identify.

What's to keep you from signing up for google's conversion data, and artifically making the sites you're spending lots of money with look like they convert relatively worse than the sites you're getting less traffic from? Basically, you're trying to smartprice the sites you're spending the most money on.

Google could monitor for this, but you could just make sure you include the conversion data every time you get a hit from a Google IP address.

As somebody showing AdSense ads, this concerns me. What's to keep my advertisers from screwing me out of commission, simply by declining to tell Google about all the conversions?

 

[wickedDUDE]

because it would take way too much time

 

[Numbat]

It'd take like 30 minutes in research, and maybe another hour (at most) of coding to do this. Spending an hour to cut out a big fraction of your advertising costs doesn't seem that bad to me.

I think a better argument would be that it's not worth it for the small fish, and most of the big fish wouldn't risk getting banned by Google for messing with it.

 

[gdubs12345]

That's a smart idea, but i think it would take alot of non converting clicks to get a good site that converts , smartpriced.

 

[aeiouy]

This has crossed my mind in the past.

 

[Stanley]

it's a cool idea, and it shouldn't be that difficult to implement