Forum Moderators: martinibuster
A person has website with Adsense running on it. The person has her URL all across her car. In addition to running Adsense she teaches computer classes as a free lancer. She arrives at a school where there are 40 - 60 students using the same IP. The students visit their teacher's website and some of them click on some of the Adsense ads. Because the school has only one single ISDN connection, all the students access the ads from the same IP. What would you do to keep in line with the Adsense TOS?
It doesn't seem necessary, but if you're really concerned then figure out the school's IP range and either don't show them AdSense ads or, if that's not possible, ban that IP from the site altogether.
P.S. If you were to have kids go to your site in order to complete some assignment, that's a different matter and it could eventually catch up to you. I'm not saying it's "wrong" or a violation of the TOS, but over the long run it could skew the traffic pattern of your site in strange and not positive directions.
I mean, there are a hundred and one situations when true-blue legitimate clicks may come from a single IP.
True. It is a common mistake for Internet beginners to concoct algorithms that assume that an IP address uniquely identifies a human being. Google is not an Internet beginner.
On the other hand, it is also not unreasonable in searching for someone who wants to detect click fraud to perform data mining that may notice that
a) AdSense customer X is highly likely to log in to her account from IP address Y.
b) IP address Y exhibits bursts of clicks that deliver profit to AdSense customer X.
c) When a and b are true, the likelihood of fraud is increased.
On the third hand, having watched the most incredibly brazen click fraud (hour-long bursts of 100% CTR repeatedly daily for weeeks) go unchecked by Google until a human (me) complained, it's hard to rule out the possibility that Google just ain't that sophisticated (yet) at detecting click fraud.
T'were me, I think the better part of valor would be to not display AdSense ads to that particular IP address.
It's also worth noting that in a school you could have dozens of computers that are configured identically, and are indistinguishable to Google except for whatever cookies they have set.
Excuse me guys, but I just couldn't believe this sort of reasoning is valid. I mean, there are a hundred and one situations when true-blue legitimate clicks may come from a single IP.
I agree. It seems that most of the cases of click fraud we've read about here have been caused not by clicks but by the nature of the site the clicks are coming from (except in the extreme cases). If this happens once a month or once a year, probably no problem. If it happens every day, probably a problem.
