Who bans you?

[PalX]

First, im not banned from Adsense.

But the way this forum made me know all about adsense, it also made me worry since each day I see “I’m banned from adsense” topics.

So I decided to do a research and came to the following conclusion:

1-The same person clicking on 10(this number is an example) different ads (in one day) on your site is not a problem as much as clicking on the same ad 5(this number is an example) times.

2-the reason to be banned because of click fraud is not Google, it’s the advertiser, which means if someone clicks 100 times (again the number is an example) on a specific ad, and the advertiser didn’t complain about it to Google then nothing will happen.

I may be wrong, but this is the conclusion I made after reading many things on this forum and on the internet

[aeiouy]

Interesting theory, but I am guessing most fraud is detected by google and not by the advertisers.

[Rahu]

i think google checks your account for fraud clicks occassionally and also when an advertiser complains.
its both.

[jomaxx]

1-Unknown and difficult to quantify, but overall I tend to disagree.
2-I'm with aeiouy. I doubt this very much. I think it's primarily a combination of algorithmic checks and semi-random spot checks.

[lammert]

The same person clicking on 10(this number is an example) different ads (in one day) on your site is not a problem as much as clicking on the same ad 5(this number is an example) times.

As an AdWords advertiser I actually quite often see one visitor clicking my ad more than once in a time span of about 10 or 15 minutes. This is because of normal surfing behaviour. The visitors sees a block with ads about widgets and he is checking the ads one by one and sometimes also returning to a previous ad to see if that advertiser offers the most interesting content.

So a visitor clicking on several ads within a short timespan is interested in widgets and checking the offers of several advertisers. A visitor clicking more than once on the same ad withing a short timespan is very interested in the widgets of that specific advertiser. I would call it the footprint of a potential customer, rather than a sign of click fraud.

[miguelito]

well that´s exactly how i operate...if i want to buy a dvd/cd from amazon, i will probably go back to the same link about 3-4 times on average during the day before i decide whether to buy or not, basically because i am "shopping around" and comparing prices.

[jema]

I have been running adsense for quite a while, but only with serious intent for the last year. I only started logging quite recently, the find some of the patterns look pretty weird, so weird on once case I have preemptively sent a question to google adsense support.

Just today, I saw 6 hits at the very start of the day on a small site of mine and a 100% CTR!

It does easily get your paraniod streak running. But I have to assume the oddities are going on, whether you are aware of them via logging or not, and if you are running genuine web sites, with a track record, then google will not be ban happy.

e.g. in the case of my sites, it should be pretty obvious that 95%+ of the clicks are normal, and hence no web master in their right mind would be thinking it clever to cheat for an extra 5% and risk getting banned.

I'd like to hear more from google about what causes the apparent oddities, as they must know every weird thing in the book by now. But maybe they have good reason for keeping things secret.