Google Adwords Villian

Alright, I just have to post about this guy. If you’re involved in PPC search arbitrage at all, you most likely know the guy who is gaming Adwords. If you don’t know about him, basically here’s what happens : he has 20 ads running along the sidebar in Google. It looks like this when you type “ringtones” into Google :

Now recently, he’s taken over the dating space as well :

I’ve also seen him dabble around in other niches as well, and I’m sure he certainly feels proud of all the attention he’s getting. But in the midst of his glory, he’s killing many affiliates campaigns. Every affiliate in positions 3 and below are being pushed out of ad impressions, which can very easily kill a campaign. He originally using Azoogle to do this, but now looks like he’s using Copeac and possibly CPA Empire.

Now let’s try and think of how he could be doing this. One possible way is through some source of a massive amount of vouchers. He obtains vouchers in high volume for a low cost, then starts up hundreds of accounts with the vouchers. Let’s say they’re $50 vouchers…he makes 10 accounts and bids $5.00/click with all of them. We’ll estimate he pays around $3/click, which gives each account a life of 17 clicks. So 170 clicks he has before his burst of accounts dies. These are all just guesses, he may use $250 vouchers – who knows. The accounts all go up, vouchers are depleted, and then the ads go away. This would explain the how sporadic the displaying is. One minute the domination is up, the next down.

The other possible way he could be doing this is just with expired credit cards or something like that, but I don’t think that would be how it’s done. Pre-paid gift cards are another option, but I think Google has ways of preventing that from happening.

The one thing that I never got was how he gets all of his ads approved when the titles are ALL IN CAPS. I test with just making 1 word in the description in caps and the ad always gets disapproved (well 95% of the time). So not only are his ads all in caps which isn’t allowed, but they all have what Google would classify as “inaccurate display URLs”. How this is all getting by is beyond me…perhaps it’s some major conspiracy and it’s actually someone internally from Google gaming the system using vouchers and offshore accounts! Bwahaha.

Really though, I’m not sure exactly how this guy is doing it. He’s clearly breaking the rules, clearly screwing a lot of affiliates, and clearly is making some decent profit.

Shady bastard.