What can I do about Click Stealers?

[pops]

I don't know what else to call 'em, so I guess click stealers is ok.
I Placed an ad with a PPC. Within 12 hours all my funds had been used up and I was actually elated. I checked my website about every hour because I am anxious, ya know. Anyway, after the funds were gone, I figured I had had about 300 new unique visitors. Imagine my anguish when I checked my stats and discovered that I had a total of, over this time period, exactly three (3) count 'em, three unique visitors!
I knew that someone had been repeatedly clicking my ad just to use up my funds.
I emailed the PPC about it and they told me that they had a great system in place to detect this kind of thing and that my ad had not been clicked on repeatedly by the same person. They said that my site must have been down for all that time.
I say nuts, as I said, I was on my site nearly hourly, just to make sure things were working right. (I'm a newbie and susceptible to that kind of thing, I guess.)
Has anyone else had this problem, and what in the heck do you do about it? Sheesh, right now, I'm seriously pi.... er.. peeved!!
Thanks for any input.

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hey Pops,

I can appreciate that you are peeved... big time!

Which PPC was it?

So far you've done exactly what you should have done... but I would go farther and send them a copy of your webstats for that time period.

Get backup confirmation from your ISP if the PPC company gives you hassle about those.

Don't forget to demand a refund and keep at it until they do!

Cheers,
Ros

[pops]

Thanks Ros,
I appreciate your input and suggestions and I will do exactly what you suggest.
I didn't think I could get so emotional about this, but I am starting to think of my website as 'My Baby' and, quite frankly, it DOES peev me when this kind of thing happens. I will let you know how this all washes out.
Thanks again,

[pops]

I'm sorry, Ros, but I left one thing out of the above post.
The PPC I was using was GoClick.com.
Actually, I have been using them for awhile and didn't have this problem, but this month it really hit home. Go figure.
Thanks,

[WindyCity]

Hi Cliff,

You will find this to happen more often in the smaller PPc search engines. They simply do not have the Infrastructure that some of the big boys do, like Google and Yahoo and a few others.

Although you can most often find cheaper bids and click cost on these smaller engines, it really doesn't do you any good if your not getting a return on your investment.

If you plan on investing long term in PPC engines, I would stay with Google at first and as you progress and fine tune your ads, then branch out to a few others.

If you are not aware of what you are doing with PPC, it can cost you a bunch of money (even on Google). I would seek out a good keyword research tools (Ross has some great suggestions) for your research.

I would also learn how to properly setup a PPC campaign if you havn't done so already. Ross teaches some great tactics in her book and if you want to take it a step further, I would suggest heading over to perrymarshall.com and picking up a copy of The Definitve Guide to Google Adwords.

If you already know about these resources and your skill level is already where you want it to be with PPC advertising, then congratulations, because you have taken the steps that most people don't when they setup a PPC campaign. If you need to learn more about the subject and want to give yourself a better chance to succeed, then I highly recommend the resources I stated above.

Good luck