Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've NEVER even clicked on my own ad to test it. I believed in their system.
My CTR is double digits consistently for many thousand impressions.
Today, I received an email saying they have detected "invalid clicks".
CTRs have been consistent since day one, +/- 10%.
Is there anything I can do except wait and see?
We have to stand together and stay informed to keep Google from squeezing us out like this.
Dave.
That said, even with a consistent CTR that high, there is the possibility that an audit is showring irregularities that could have resulted in the fraudulent clicks email - such as the same IPs showing up clicking ads on a daily basis throughout the month.
br33526, I think seeber01 hit it on the head. Go on the offensive with a helpful and courteous e-mail to Google and ask their advice on how to deal with the problem. I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear of the developments.
Good luck,
2odd...
robho, I believe br33526 said that the clickthrough rate was in 'double figures'
True, I must have missed that bit. Assuming both figures are before the decimal point :-) that's an excellent CTR.
I would think it must be pretty tough to come up with a cover-all-bases algo and the rate in which google algo triggers (from the posts here) make me wonder whether the triggers are automated or hand checked?
CTR could potentially depend on a wide variety of things, and just a day or even a week of anomaly CTR, imo, doesn't prove the clicks to be invalid. for e.g., you run a very timely site on a hot topic, say about a very popular music band that is touring US, and when the ads are highly targeted, i would tend to expect a high CTR for a considerable amounts of time..
What gives?
Thanks
I wrote an email to Google advising them of my concern regarding reports about CT fraud and honest webmasters receiving their email. Specifically how do we prevent competitors from abusing our site.
Their response was they have proprietary technology that can track and filter ... "clicks generated through normal use by users and clicks generated by click spammers and automated robots..."
In my opinion, however, they may not be able to tell if the owner/webmaster is involved in the use of automated robots. Consequently we may see the "dreaded email." By offering assistance and the proper attitude, hopefully we can circumvent or reverse removal from Adsense, and help improve the program at the same time.
Just my 2 cents.
Debs
Google could switch out the normal ads with PSAs and see if the CTR changes or not. If it doesn't then you may have a robot.
You could compare the CTR of particular ads on an individual site with the CTR from Google or other sites. Anything way out of wack would trigger a flag.
Tracking with cookies is another choice. I wonder if they check to see if a webmaster has cleared out his cookies since his last login to the stats? If I were Google I would be more suspicious of webmasters who do not leave cookies on all the time. They may have deleted them to hide their own clicks on ads.
Tracking by IP seems that it would only be effective for short periods of time. If a ton of clicks come through an IP in ten minutes then you probably have a problem.
This doesn't even begin to touch on more complicated pattern recognition or other methods.
As stated above, the scary part is that someone could point a robot at your site and get you kicked out of the program. There are people who spend months developing viruses. How long do you think it will be until some idiot decides to write scripts to make fake clicks on Adsense ads? They could do that on Google itself also of course. It's a bit of a hole in CPC advertising at this point. Hopefully Google will come up with a solution soon.
They replied and didn't give me any specifics, just links to their policies.
I think somehow, their fraud algo got triggered and they sent me the email.
I'm guessing that a person will probably review whatever flags their algo triggered and see if they are valid.
2 possibilities that I thought of:
1. I have some sites that have over-lapping traffic, because they fall under the same generic category. Thus, they show the same ads sometimes. If a person finds both sites within one session and clicks on the same ad, could this be a problem?
2. I have recently deleted cookies from my work computer for other programming testing, but I still never clicked on any ads. (this would be the IP that I login to adsense)
Silver_Surfer
