Last week I started experimenting a bit with my Google Adwords campaigns. Needless to say that I run ads for ‘futurist' and ‘keynote speaker' etc, and have been doing so for years.  I was curious to find out what would happen if I increased my budget x5 or x10, so I tried this out while I followed my Futuristgerd.com site's analytics account in realtime.  Within 5 minutes after the budget increase I had 20+ people on my site, some triggered by the exact keywords I had set and some with similar phrases – but not a single click that seemed sincere or otherwise ‘real'. Almost all of the clicks were from India, Indonesia, Thailand and other SEA nations. Almost all of them clicked and viewed the landing page (futuristgerd.com), and then left immediately. Yet, I paid between 1 and 4 CHF (approx. $ 0.80 to $3.60) for these meaningless clicks.

Utterly baffled, I tried the same exercise again, today, this time excluding users in those countries that clicked on my previous ads (India, Indonesia etc) and narrowing the keywords to even more precise terms such as ‘public keynote speaker'.  Even so, after increasing the budget 5x, it only took 3 minutes for 10+ people from India and Mexico etc to come an click on my ads, visit my site and leave immediately.  Money wasted, again. Needless to say, there is something seriously wrong here, and I will investigate this asap. My Google adwords campaigns have all been put on hold because this looks like a total scam to me.

If any of you know what to make out of this I'd love some advise or comments. Thanks?  Google?