The Value of A Google AdWords Account Manager – Preventing Fraud

I had a client on let me know on Sunday night that they would be bringing their Google AdWords account management in-house. I disabled my access to their account Monday morning. On Wednesday, they let me know that they could not log into their account.

It appears that in three days their account was hijacked and someone installed two campaigns on their account and ran up a bill of over $9,956.00 in clicks. Some of the clicks were over $28 each. I contacted Google for them today as soon as I was told they could not login and got Google working on a click fraud and account hijack issue. I reported to the client to advise his credit card company to put a fraud alert on his account. I can still not get into their AdWords account, but have access to Google Analytics and can see that new campaigns were set up and nearly $10,000 spent in just two or three days.

I have to say as I am on my Google AdWords accounts daily through My Client Center, that it would probably not have happened on my watch!

This is just one of the values of an account manager, identifying strange behavior that could be fraudulent, finding new campaigns or keywords, and catching a spike in activity. If you are not monitoring your Google AdWords account on a regular basis, you really should start. I never thought that this would ever happen to anyone I knew but yet here it is. Fraud happens!

WordPress 2.5.1 Get Ready For Big Changes

If you are using WordPress for your blog, you will not even recognize the newest version of WordPress as a WordPress application.

The interface is slick and loaded with AJAX, but is slicker better? Well we’ve seen bugs in the spell checker and image up loader already. I know that WordPress has some fixes for this already in place, but what a pain.

There is some new power with the new application, but I was so comfortable with the old set up, it is hard to get used to the new interface. If you are currently using the older version of WordPress, you may want to wait several months to upgrade until some of these bugs are worked out.