Clear Guidelines on Click-Tracking Adsense

Does Google provide any these days?

[ronburk]

Like a lot of webmasters, I like lots of data to analyze. Some time ago, when I looked into tracking AdSense clicks to give me some high-granularity information on that visitor behavior, there were plenty of people doing it, but I could not arrive at any great confidence that their solutions did not incur TOS violations.

Has that changed? Is there a clear Google statement or a widely accepted consensus on which ad-click-tracking techniques are acceptable to Google?

Feel free to just point me to threads if this is a FAQ.

[JamesR3]

This has been discussed plenty. I think the current answer is that no one seems to be aware of commerical products that can do this for Firefox or Netscape due to different programming issues, but with IE you can definitely track click-throughs without touching the AdSense code. No TOS problems.

[jetteroheller]

I just tried to test a script from a click tracking thread

<script type="text/javascript">

function log() {
var bug = new Image();
h=document.getElementsByTagName("iframe")[0].innerHTML;
bug.src = "http://some-domain.com/index.htm?"+h;
}

x = document.getElementsByTagName("iframe");
for(i=0;i<x.length;i++) {
x[i].attachEvent("onfocus",log)
}
</script>

I tested it with an Amazon Iframe.
Nothing happened.
I added an alert(h); on the end of the function log
The alert shows up as soon as I click on the Amazon link, the log file of some-domain.com showe a long string with the innerHTML, but no change to Amazon happens.

Tested with MSIE6

Any idea why the test failed?

I tested before with window.status instead of innerHTML, but no window.status appeared.