Countires behind proxy

how are the clicks treated?

[Hobbs]

Does anyone know how google treats clicks from countries behind proxies were all clicks appear to originate from few IPs?

Are those clicks just discounted, cancelled, or treated normally?

Is there a risk of mistaken clicks TOS violation false positives?

Is it better - income wise - to block serving ads to countries like China, Iran, Dubai, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam.. US universities and libraries?

What if a big portion of your traffic is coming from there?

I think Google deals with business proxies, but its a different magnitude when you consider the volume of impressions and clicks from proxied countries, what happens when there is a real click attack from one of those countries, do you just loose your earnings for the whole country?

[DamonHD]

Hi,

G cannot just ignore clicks from such places as China!

It will be harder for G to distinguish repeat clicks, etc, but even with repeated use of the same IPs they can distinguish to some extent by cookies, UA header, time separation, etc, etc.

I have run a reasonable-size campaign in AsiaPac through G and AdBrite to increase my traffic from there, and just set up two local mirror servers, and (a) there is still a reasonable number of IPs in use in AsiaPac traffic and (b) G seems quite happy to charge me for my AW clicks from there and (c) pay me for my AS clicks from there.

(My experience suggests that you want to test very carefully whether to have the Search Network and Content Network boxes ticked for AdWords AsiaPac campaigns however. Currently I have only Content Network and (Google) Search enabled for my AsiaPac spend.)

Rgds

Damon

[toldan]

Proxy clicks are no problem for Google at all.

You know why? Because no proxy can hide your real IP address.

Google knows that many people use proxies thinking that way they protect their privacies etc, but the fact is - no proxy can hide your real IP, and I am sure Google technology records both: proxy + real IP when recording a click.

Don't even worry about it, it's not a problem at all. Siginificant portion of people on the internet is behind proxies, anyways.

[jomaxx]

You might as well ask what they do with the huge volume of traffic from AOL and AOL Europe. It's the same basic problem.

The specific way they handle such traffic is unknown and is one of Google's trade secrets. But it would be folly to try to ban all such traffic and I'm sure Google doesn't want or expect you to.

[jomaxx]

Toldan, how specifically does Google know the "real" IP when coming in through a proxy server or proxied ISP? AOL users for example don't even have a permanent IP.

[Hobbs]

Thaks all, good to hear it.

toldan:

no proxy can hide your real IP address

beg to differ but that's another thread another place.

[toldan]

jomaxx - AOL (aka: dial-up users) do not have permanent IP because every time they dial different number to connect to the internet (for example, there might be 10 different phone numbers to dial and AOL selects the fastest etc). That's why their IP changes.

If you have permanent IP and you hide it behind proxy, your "real IP" will still be visible to Google due to some java glitches.

If you don't believe me, go to: www.stayinvisible.com and hide your IP behind proxy, then TEST your IP and the system will still show your "real IP" hidden behind proxy.

[jomaxx]

Interesting if true (it's too much of a pain to find a proxy for me to bother testing it), but I don't believe there's any Java component of an AdSense clickthrough. Unless you are actually referring to Javascript.

[btas2]

Of course proxies can hide your IP.

Most don't, but not because they can't.

[miguelito]

ridiculous to say proxy IPs can't hide your real IP.

there are many different types of proxy from transparent to totally masked.

[Gian04]

I agree with toldan, you can't hide your real IP for Java-enabled browser. But you can hide it by disabling your browser's java scripting.