Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I came across this board whilst looking for info about AdSense, as a few days ago, my account was suspended for "fraud clicks."
Having read around, there has been much said concerning warning e-mails being sent before termination.
I never got any such warning, nor did I know of anything like this happening. I was just terminated. Boom. No questions asked.
I was informed today that not only am I not getting the over $1,000 payment for this month that had built up, but I'm not getting the $200+ payment that was approved on June 16th for April and May. I felt this was extremely unfair, as the payment was approved, but the termination occured 6 days later.
I was hoping I could get some help concerning this. I understand there is an AdSense rep here? Any ideas how to proceed? Any idea to find out exactly why this occured or how? I'm completely in the dark and hoping to find a couple of answers.
Thanks in advance . . .
-Tony
When it comes to this kind of situation, you must contact the AdSense team directly through their support. They are the only ones who can give you any answers or look into your account for possible reinstatement.
I did contact them, but they haven't given me much of anything in the way of actual answers. =\
I was informed today that not only am I not getting the over $1,000 payment for this month that had built up, but I'm not getting the $200+ payment that was approved on June 16th for April and May. I felt this was extremely unfair, as the payment was approved, but the termination occured 6 days later.
Wow, less than $100 for April, over $100 in May and over $1000 so far for June! If that's genuine that's pretty amazing though I can see why the Adsense team might be suspicious, especially if your CTR was rocketing as well. Best to contact Adsense directly again through the Adsense website. Good Luck!
Been using it since October 2003.
The clicks had been rising considerably since March, since the site was becoming more and more popular . . . kind of coincided with my own popularity and the fact that we have huge information archives on martial arts, wrestling and sports supplements . . . I dunno, things just exploded in May and June and then the shut down. I could see why Google would be suspicious, but it coincided with a massive burst of new traffic to the site.
Perhaps a pattern something Google should look into?
There are many reasons for sudden rises in traffic. For eaxmple: we've added a new site to one account recently. New site is doing 10 times the original.
Yes, it does, at least temporarily if not for a longer time as the ads are new to the new visiters that have never visited the site. Same effect as when you put AdSense on a site for the first time: all users click on them to figure out what they are.
Yes, it does, at least temporarily if not for a longer time as the ads are new to the new visiters that have never visited the site. Same effect as when you put AdSense on a site for the first time: all users click on them to figure out what they are.
It could be, but hasn't been in my experience. I've had days where traffic is 50,000 visitors above what it normally is and CTR has always been consistent.
I agree that a repeat visitor will be curious about a new ad when adsense is first added to a site, however the difference between repeat visitors clicking on a new ad out of curiousity and new visitors clicking on them is that a new visitor won't recognize them as out of the ordinary and therefore wouldn't click them unless they were genuinely interested in their content.
I guess the relevant question here is did Tony do something fraudulent? (i.e. click on his own ads at all) and if he did, should Google have warned him first before terminating his account and paid him for something that was approved prior?
[I'm not making any judgments about you specifically, Tony, just explaining it as I see it from Google's point of view using you as the hypothetical.]
Here's my take: From what I gather, Google won't terminate someone unless they determine that the fraudulent activity was extremely severe (or at least the probability that the activity was fraudulent is very high). They may have traced severe click activity to your IP for instance, in which case no warning letter is needed - the clicker already knows he's doing something wrong.
Once they have reasonably determined that someone's account is associated with fraudulent activity, it makes sense that they'd withhold all payment that is still in their control (even seemingly clean months) because of the liklihood that fraudulent activity was occurring then too. They probably refund any advertiser who has used your account during those periods with that money.
Anyhow, is it "fair" that they withheld payment from you even if you did nothing wrong? Legally yes - because you agreed to this possibility when you joined their program, even if it's in error. Does it suck that you had to agree to this term to be a part of their program? Yes. But again, it's something you were forewarned about and it's understandable that Google has it in there to protect themselves and their clients from fraud.
Good luck with this. I hope it works out in the end.
Googles customer support defintely took a lot of time, reading and replying to various emails I sent them (I got past the normal form letters), but unfortunately they were not able to reveal what had caused the clicks, only that they had re-reveiwed them (eventually four times) and that they had defintely taken place.
My final conclusion after the incident were that either a competitor or someone else had clicked on a ton of the ads causing some kind of automatic termination, or that the increase in traffic (and CTR) had caused it. I'm leaning towards the second option, but I have no real way to prove it.
I know other sites have reported that they have had large traffic spikes, without any problems, but when I did get a large traffic spike, the CTR also increased by about 50% I think. I attributed this to new visitors seeing the site for the first time, and seeing those ads for the first time.
Hopefully your case ends up better then mine does. Has anyone ever heard of an account being reinstated after being suspended?
As most sites will grow and grow over time, slightly increasing traffic each week / month, some sites may experiance high bursts, such as links from newsarticles and such. This was the case with one of my sites a while ago when a link to it was placed on the AOL startup screen. Huge traffic burst, hundreds of thousands of users in just a couple hours. Does this mean I am up to no good? No, it is a revenue chance for me and google.
I understand the reason for google to not want to tell publishers what made clicks invalid in order to keep more control over the program, but termination for nothing more than a generic reason is disrespectful to the hand that fed google. Publishers make google a lot of money, and if it comes down to it, investigate a little more and adapt your program to combat the methods of fradualnt clickers, do not simply terminate people at will because you do not want to take the time to dig to the root of the problem and implement new featuers that protect yourself and publishers, as well as adwords folks from fraud in the future.
Account terminations seem to be fairly common, maybe a couple a day, maybe a couple a week. I would think that some of these, certainly not all, but some are good publishers who got slapped in the face and they do not know what happened. Clicking methods for internet users are out of our control, but filtering methods on the google side are certainly under their control.
I wish the best of luck in getting to the bottom of this click fraud case TonySmith. I hope google uses incidents like these as oppertunities to make the system more robust rather than the easy way of kicking people out.
That post was ignorant and irresponsible. At the same time it once again underscores the ridiculous nature of this AdSense stuff.
Someday....oneday....hopefully soon, a class action suit will straighten out the problem. Until then, we are making history.
A site can go from zero to thousands per month in AdSense revenue very organically, but apparently a webmaster cannot. Google will keep the cash -- no questions asked, and (gasp) with the support of many webmasters like the one who posted this!
That post was ignorant and irresponsible. At the same time it once again underscores the ridiculous nature of this AdSense stuff.
I disagree a 10 fold increase in revenue from a site from one month to another taken by itself is suspicious. Of course, there could be a myriad of reasons why the increase is kosher, but setting that as an audit trigger is a good idea.
There must be something else.
That something else is SOMETHING that Google really really should tell us... of course, the spammers must be listening as well...
Also is Google right in witholding payments without any explanation or evidence, is it legal?
A competitve analysis, a keyword analysis, a gap analysis, copywrite review, page redesign, site structure redesign, performance -- it all aims for increased *everything* and it works.
I routinely take sites from low $xx/month to high $XXX over the course of two or perhaps three cycles. By your logic this is suspicious.... that is ridiculous. Obviously you have never worked in law, medical, health, wellness, real estate, travel, web hosting, blah blah blah name your high value advertising market niche here.
At first they went up 2-3% and then back down to usual levels.
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"I guess the relevant question here is did Tony do something fraudulent? (i.e. click on his own ads at all) and if he did, should Google have warned him first before terminating his account and paid him for something that was approved prior?"
Nah, I don't click my own ads; trust me, I'm well aware of the TOS. Good possibility though, and that's a good question to ask in these cases.
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"Googles customer support defintely took a lot of time, reading and replying to various emails I sent them (I got past the normal form letters), but unfortunately they were not able to reveal what had caused the clicks, only that they had re-reveiwed them (eventually four times) and that they had defintely taken place.
My final conclusion after the incident were that either a competitor or someone else had clicked on a ton of the ads causing some kind of automatic termination, or that the increase in traffic (and CTR) had caused it. I'm leaning towards the second option, but I have no real way to prove it."
Sounds pretty much like what happened with me, or what I think happened, anyway.
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"As most sites will grow and grow over time, slightly increasing traffic each week / month, some sites may experiance high bursts, such as links from newsarticles and such"
Yeah, we've gotten a lot of hits from <snip>, which is a massive <snip> site, and I'd estimate about 3 out of every 4 people of our new traffic came from there in the last 3 months alone, and that was a spike that went up by about a million or so hits.
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"Also is Google right in witholding payments without any explanation or evidence, is it legal?"
Good question . . .
[edited by: Jenstar at 11:35 pm (utc) on June 25, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics or URLs, as per TOS [/edit]
I routinely take sites from low $xx/month to high $XXX over the course of two or perhaps three cycles. By your logic this is suspicious....
I am not sure if this response is directed at me, but here is my position.
-I said 10-fold increase from one month to another. You mention cycles? What is your definition of cycle?
-A ten-fold increase from one month to another should be a trigger for an audit. Because it is suspicious.
-I am not saying that in itself the increase would be all that would be needed to get a publisher in trouble, all that I am saying is that it makes sense to take a look at an account that exhibits this characteristic.
It is just common sense and it is not “ridiculous”. I am far from being an expert in statistics although I have taken some graduate courses in it, but I would imagine that this type of revenue increase is far from the norm.
"They (Google) may have traced severe click activity to your IP for instance"
I am situated in an area (read country) where "dial-up" is still the main system to connect to the Internet, with 3 a 4 ISPs being mostly used.
So that thousands of users are surfing my site with the same IP number. Plus my site is related to this area, hence 50% of the visitors are have the same IP number.
1. You strike a deal with someone to display ads on your site.
2. You provide good real estate for a few months and the advertiser gets payed for diaplaying ads on your site by their clients.
3. Suddenly the client refuses to pay and acuses you of false clicks without providing a detailed explanation.
If it wasn't big G we would maybe be looking at a law suit?
Whilst I'm sure that there are people out there using clickers and other means to push up their revenue and hope that they get struck off PDQ there may be some that are not.
"Also is Google right in witholding payments without any explanation or evidence, is it legal?"
According to the Terms and Conditions that publishers accept when they join AdSense, Google can withhold payments for fraudulent clicks or for "impressions or clicks co-mingled with a significant number of fraudulent impressions or fraudulent clicks," "as reasonably determined by Google." (Italics added.)
Getting back to this particular case, I wonder if the publisher's subject category played any role in Google's decision to terminate the account. Is fraud a bigger problem on <widget> sites than on, say, sites about breast cancer or pet rabbits? If so, maybe such sites are more likely to get audited when other statistical anomalies raise a flag. And once audited, maybe they're less likely to receive the benefit of the doubt.
[edited by: Jenstar at 11:36 pm (utc) on June 25, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]
According to the Terms and Conditions that publishers accept when they join AdSense, Google can withhold payments for fraudulent clicks or for "impressions or clicks co-mingled with a significant number of fraudulent impressions or fraudulent clicks," "as reasonably determined by Google." (Italics added.)
Thats fair, but shouldn't there be an appeal process or a requirement to provide evidence. The point I was trying to make was that you could provide a legitamite service and not get paid and at the moment it appears with no recourse to dispute.
Yeah, we've gotten a lot of hits from <snip>, which is a massive <snip> site, and I'd estimate about 3 out of every 4 people of our new traffic came from there in the last 3 months alone, and that was a spike that went up by about a million or so hits.
Tony,
If you think it was the sudden burst of traffic from <snip> that led to this, here are a few things you may want to look into:
1. Was your site featured/promoted/linked from there in anyway?
2. Do you know what brought-in those additional million hits all of a sudden from that site?
3. Was that new traffic from <snip> (judging from corresponding entries in your logfiles) significantly different than your usual traffic?
4. Did you spot unusual browsing patterns in your logfiles/stats?
I would suggest looking into these kinds of details (if not already) and sharing your findings with Adsense team. Not sure if this would change anything, but sharing such details/findings could possibly help support your case.
Sudden increase in traffic/impressions may flag a site for an audit, but I don't think that alone would result in a knock-out.
[edited by: Jenstar at 11:37 pm (utc) on June 25, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics please, as per TOS [/edit]
Thats fair, but shouldn't there be an appeal process or a requirement to provide evidence. The point I was trying to make was that you could provide a legitamite service and not get paid and at the moment it appears with no recourse to dispute.
That's true, but Google isn't a court of law: It's a business. It doesn't have to offer an appeals process (although it apparently does have a review process). As for providing evidence, Google isn't about to supply information that outsiders could use to reverse-engineer or circumvent its fraud-detection mechanism.
Technically we aren't a <widget> site. It just so happens that gfaqs has a massive fanbase for <widgets>, and that was one of our targets for getting our site known, as those boards are also hotbeds for <widget> discussion, more so at the <snip> board.
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"Tony,
If you think it was the sudden burst of traffic from <snip> that led to this, here are a few things you may want to look into:
1. Was your site featured/promoted/linked from there in anyway?"
Linked, yep. Several people passing around links to the forums in particular.
"2. Do you know what brought-in those additional million hits all of a sudden from that site?"
If it helps, we had a huge discussion at our boards concerning the use of <controversial widgets> which led to a lot of heated arguments, which, as a result, led to over 100,000 page views in about 3 weeks in that topic alone.
"3. Was that new traffic from <snip> (judging from corresponding entries in your logfiles) significantly different than your usual traffic?"
They immediately headed for our discussion boards, which was the biggest place of activity. Not really unusual, I guess.
"4. Did you spot unusual browsing patterns in your logfiles/stats?"
Not really, no.
"I would suggest looking into these kinds of details (if not already) and sharing your findings with Adsense team. Not sure if this would change anything, but sharing such details/findings could possibly help support your case."
I'll give it a shot but they seem to have stopped responding to e-mails after I let them know of a good deal of this information.
"Sudden increase in traffic/impressions may flag a site for an audit, but I don't think that alone would result in a knock-out."
You'd think so but that seems to be the case here, unless there really was someone "out to get me."
[edited by: Jenstar at 11:39 pm (utc) on June 25, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics or keywords, as per TOS [/edit]
I do not see any real way of eliminating problems from clicks form similar IPS and such. It is unfortunate that google decided to use IP's as the method for determining whose who. It is also unfortunate that MAC addresses are dropped from hardware to hardware, as that would really be the best way to track, it would be on a machine basis. Sure MAC addresses can be spoofed, but so can IP addresses, so that is not an arguement. It would be nice if IP headers did not replace each hop with the previus routers / machines MAC, but then you would have giant IP packet headers and that would not quite work out.
I would think they are developing some kind of cookie solution where a user would have a unique number rather than use IP. No way exists for anyone to get around similar IP problems. All ISPs have different methods of distributing IP addresses. It is also unfortunate that are IP address gets recorded each time we log in, because many of us operate from various locations, and no IP for cable modem or DSL is guranteed to be re-assigned at the next DHCP recycle. Dial up users are just screwed because their IP changes all the time.
The conclusion, IP is a bad way to track things, as any number of special situations can exist that can make everyday activity look suspicious enough to warrent termination, but nothing right now exists that can provide a good solution.
[edited by: Jenstar at 1:30 am (utc) on June 26, 2004]
[edit reason] No moderator discussion as per TOS # 24 [/edit]
I wonder if the publisher's subject category played any role in Google's decision to terminate the account.
A cycle is a stats pay cycle, so yes that would be a month of data, which takes at least 7 weeks to show up as a check from Google give the way they control things.
With your graduate stats knowledge you should know that 1000% growth when you start at 1 is not alot of traffic, and for a site to go from $100 to $1000 is not at all unusual if the traffic started low and grew.
It is just common sense and it is not ridiculous.
To claim that a 10x increase over a month should flag an audit is ridiculous. This is the Internet - raw numbers mean nothing. If Google can't tell the difference between scam traffic and organic traffic then they should pay, not hold back. If your blog gets slashdotted it'll go from 10/day to 1 million.... should Google keep the cash? Google seems to think it should, either pay reducing your PPC share or by closing your account without paying the past due amounts.
