My wife and I run two businesses: a web design business as well as an online store. This is my first SEOmoz post, but I thought it was important to share my recent experience with Adwords hackers.

Recently, while looking into ways of optimising our online store's web site and increasing organic listings, and after reading some SEOmoz articles, to my surprise I found that my Adwords campaigns were not showing on this search.

Nothing at all.

That would explain the dip in sales.

When I went into my admin, I was shocked to see that I had over $6,000 owing on my account--an account which uses less than $15/day on Adwords. How did this happen?

 

As I looked into it further, I found that someone had duplicated a campaign and put in a lot of ads for some African airfare company, racking up lots of clicks in 24 hours. Incredible.

At first I panicked and thought, I can't afford 6k for clicks i didn't get, and then I tried to work out the best way to contact Google.

First I emailed them, but did not expect a quick response. Then I did a lot of searching to find out other people's experiences, and found that a lot of others had been through this as well. I also read that Google has a live help desk. I tried hard to find this, but it was very difficult. I found out it was only available from their pages and only if a representative was available.

I discussed this with a representative and they assured me that I would not be charged for it and that they would do a full investigation. I didn't think to ask how long this would take, as I was just relieved I wasn't going to pay 6k unnecessarily.

But then it left me with no advertising for my online store, and a very reduced income whilst the investigation went on.

It has now been sorted out, but we lost a lot of money lost in revenue. Here are some of the things I've learnt from this whole experience.

• Always make passwords difficult to crack. Don't use names or simple passwords, as it leaves you vulnerable to hacking.
• Always check for spyware, as this is another way that they can use to hack your account.
• Google is there to assist you when things go wrong that aren't your fault.
• Have a backup plan for any change in advertising plans so that the income drop is not so great if this occurs.

Has anyone else here gone through this experience? We are very lucky in one sense that we have multiple businesses to fall back on, but I can only imagine how this would affect a business that loses their entire income.