In an article about impression spam on the clickznews network, impression spam is being discussed as a way to reduce the rankings of your competitors in order to free up space in your own rankings. We are of course talking about PPC advertising and then specifically the Google Adwords system.

Google Adwords uses Click Thru Rate (CTR) as part of its ranking algorithm for the ads. A company can make an ad of a competitor appear lots of times to artificially increase the number of impressions of a competitor. As a result the CTR goes down and with that the positions on the page. This is called impression spam.

What ways are available to combat impression spam? Some other factors that are likely to be part of the ranking algorithm as well can be influenced. Here is a possibility:

Separate keywords hit and move to a separate campaign. This allows you to create a new campaign for the keywords hit, in order to start fresh with the same keyword phrases. This should speed up getting back in the previously targeted positions.

For these limited number of keywords in a single campaign you can temporarily increase the daily budget to an extreme level. This may force the position to go up as more clicks are required to reach the daily budget. Though this doesn’t get you actually more clicks, the algorithm may try anyway by increasing the position of the ads.

Also try using brackets, quotes and if the problem is focused on these then try not using them. Sometimes de-optimizing your campaign may have very good results on the results, even with lower CTR’s. A high CTR can cause less impressions or lower positions because of your daily budget being too low.