Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Thanks for your email regarding the click on the PSA on your site.
We appreciate you notifying us of the click that you have made. As you've
noted, clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited, as it has
the potential to inflate advertiser costs.
If you would like to visit the destination of an ad to view its content or
to add it to your filter list, you can use the AdSense Preview Tool,
available here:
Doesn't Google have bigger fish to fry than noting and punishing the occasional accidental PSA click?
Assuming you are a good and safe driver, but also an ordinary human being living in an imperfect world who occasonally makes mistakes: Have you ever exceeded the speed limit (even if ever so slightly)? Have you ever done a "rolling stop" past a stop sign? Have you ever done a right turn on red at a no-right-turn-on-red intersection? Have you ever exceeded the parking meter limit? And so on.
Do you feel compelled to report each and every little driving/parking offense to the police?
How about, for the occasional stray single click, that Google simply drops that click from the stats? That Google, by default (uncommented, with no exchange of e-mails), permits x number of stray clicks per year (3? 5? 10?)? That Google only makes an issue of this and sends a warning e-mail if the number of stray clicks exceeds x (while continuing to exclude the stray clicks from the stats)? That Google bans you from the program only if the number of "stray" clicks is a multiple of x over a short period of time? And so on.
Again, this whole problem would vanish if Google were to introduce publisher URL filters, so that we can filter our own system(s) out of any activity stats.
In a former life, I was a Unix systems administrator. When logged in as "root", I exercised the discipline to pause and think twice before issuing commands, especially dangerous commands like "rm" (instead use "rm -i", for example), or particularly dangerous command arguments or options like * (the wildcard character).
With Adsense in place, I find myself having to again think like a Unix root user, pausing and thinking twice before every mouse click, especially when I'm tired and it's late at night. Heck, this paranoid hesitancy applies across the board to all of my web browsing activity, whether I'm on my own web pages or not. It gets to be nerve wracking after a while.
Sigh.
The problem with filters is that there is no way to attempt to filter out invalid clicks that won't ironically end up increasing the total number of invalid clicks in the long run. Cookies disappear and IP addresses change and people use different computers at different locations. IMO it's better to be programmed NEVER to click than to have publishers relying on, and perhaps being blissfully unaware of, a filter that cannot be reliable.
If we all had to report every minor driving/parking infraction to the police, or live in constant fear of the slightest goof-up causing our licenses to be revoked, many of us might very well just give up driving and start bicyling or walking everywhere instead.
I ... guess ... I'll ... just ... have ... to ... be ... more ... careful ... with ... the ... keyboard ... and ... mouse ... from ... now ... on.
Sigh.
Your point reminds me of a study I read back in the 1970s where supposedly there was statistical evidence that, paradoxically, seatbelts cause more traffic accidents and injury, because drivers become over-confident and tend to drive more recklessly.
I won't question what the Google gods say.
