This is a warning to any advertisers using Google’s click to call service – an advertiser of Google AdWords recently claimed that his click to call campaign is receiving invalid or fraudulent calls.

According to the advertisers Webmaster World post:

I’ve been happy with bid-to-call. It’s super cheap and some of the calls are good. Most are not potential customers, but that is true for clicks, too. That’s part of doing business. Overall bid-to-call has been a good thing.

However…. a couple of the AdGroups I had it on started getting a bunch of calls. These were low activity AdGroups, and there were most calls than clicks (normally the ratio is about a hundred clicks for every call). The calls were under 30 seconds, so Google does not charge us for them. I am not worried about the cost from Google. I am worried about the labor cost for my client who has to answer the phone. Too many of these low quality calls becomes a nuisance.

To remedy this, I paused the AdGroups that were generating these calls (at least, according to Google these AdGroups were generating a lot of calls.) After pausing, there were zero clicks. But the calls continued to come in! Google still reports under 30-second calls from these two AdGroups!

Is this a new form of spam or fraud? After worrying about fraudulent clicks for years am I now going to have to worry about fraudulent calls?

Click fraud has existed almost since the inception of the concept of pay-per-click marketing; sometimes at the hands of your own competitors and sometimes at the hands of the pay-per-click ad provider trying to drive up their revenue. However, click-to-call fraud is quite rare, but that doesn’t mean you should become complacent with these campaigns.

Is this a real fraud or just a bug in Google’s reporting system? A response from Google about this matter is still awaited. In the meantime, make sure to check your ad campaign and report anything suspicious before you incur any losses.

Click Here To Read Original Post on INeedHits.com