Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This is my first post on WebmasterWorld.com. Yes, I know, it's always "these people" who's first post is about having their AdSense accounts disabled!
I'm by no means new to this site, I usually just find my questions have already been answered at least ten times, somewhere. So, I never bothered to register and ask for myself.
But now I truly need help. I couldn't find any real answers after searching around.
I have an extremely popular website. My partner has been interviewed about the site on TV several times, we've been publicized in over a dozen major publications, and we are a very high PR site with thousands of good, unreciprocated incoming links.
We have been with AdSense since August 2005. The first 3 months earnings weren't much, but in December they broke the $2,000 mark. It increased a bit in January, was at $7,700 in February and in March it spiked to $21,000. The first three days of this month posted $1,800 in revenue.
The Google ads since February seemed to all be from the same 3-4 advertisers, which is how I explained the spike in revenue to myself. I thought they must have clicked the "Advertise on this site" link, and been paying more to have priority over AdWords.
Throughout my time with AdSense the CTR has always been very low (in my mind), much less than 1%.
A few minutes ago I got that dreadful email saying: <snip>Standard Invalid Clicks Email</snip>
This is incredibly troubling, as it seems to come from out of no where, for no good reason, just at the time I had earned a considerable amount of money. I feel awful right now.
I am not ready to let $21,000 go with out having done a thing wrong. That would be crazy.
I have to ask, does this mean that the $21,000 from March is going to be refunded? The CTR for last month was, as normal, well below 1%.
I've read the post about the woman who was reinstated, and I plan on writing an email to Google as well. But, I can't seem to find a definate answer to whether or not Google has the right to take back my earnings from March. Or if they have the right to kick me out and freeze my earnings, with out explaining exactly why.
When I write to Google, I plan on apoligizing for them finding invalid clicks, explain that I've done nothing wrong, and would like to be reinstated.
I would really like them to show me what went wrong, and when. I also want to ask about the $21k from last month. Is this wise?
What should I do besides the above?
This is really terrible, AdSense was looking so very promising.
~Thank you in advance for not flaming!
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:59 am (utc) on April 5, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed Email Excerpts per TOS. [/edit]
Just a question, do you have an explanation on why you triplicated your earnings from february to march?
[edited by: fischermx at 3:34 am (utc) on April 5, 2006]
You may want to take a look at this one too, if you haven't already seen it:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I hope you will be able to resolve it successfully.
Don''t push those issues. DO be as cooperative as possible. And persistent, too. You want to get past the barriers they have against people who deserved to be terminated and are just trying to BS their way back in.
IMO, the big increase in your earnings probably triggered a review, and they either found something on your site (the old "drawing undue attention" bit) or suspicious activity among the clicks. Did traffic stay the same, or did it increase? Since CTR stayed about the same, then either you were being site-targeted or there must have been a big increase in traffic. If so, that would have made them suspicious too.
If you can, analyze your logs yourself. Look for anything unusual.
Good luck!
Since apparentely you have a succesfull site, it most be this:
A competitor of yours reported you, whether with or without a reason. But may be it found something that could be slightly out of the adsense TOS in your site and based on that it reported you.
Hard to go further, sadly, link drops are not allowed here otherwise you'd have a bunch of experts reviewing your site and giving you wise opinions on what could go wrong. If you sticky us the address would be great.
If they see that too many clicks are from the same geographic area as where they send your check (or the ip you log in from) that sets off a red flag.
Is this still true with existence of ‘local targeting’? I so, it’s a bit worrisome to me – what if you live in cityA, and have a site that reviews restaurants in cityA (your city). Now with ‘local targeting’ most of the ads can be (will be) for cityA, local, topics. Also, say that most of your visitors are also locals to cityA. If they click on ads, that can raise red flag an get you in trouble? I hope I am misunderstanding something…
Sorry, that isn't much help for you at this point, but I find it hard to believe that your Adsense earnings went up 3 fold and you didn't do more digging at the time as to why that happened.
About the increase in revenue, I thought that this was common. When you try to analyse how Google credits your account, it really makes no logical sense. It is not related to clicks or impressions.
I gave up trying to understand why certain days are worth more than others months ago.
Anyway, I believe that it may have been a competitor who has cloned my site with two copy sites targeting different areas.
There is also a group called dam3tna.com that is currently mail bombing the websites' contact address as we speak. I wonder if they have anything to do with this, maybe hammering my site?
This is all making me a bit paranoid. I wish I could sleep easy tonight. Gonna give it a try.
it seems to come from out of no where, for no good reason, just at the time I had earned a considerable amount of money
It seems entirely logical that in nearly all cases of actual click fraud, termination is most likely to come "just at the time" when the site exhibiting the fraud earned a considerable amount of money.
I am not ready to let $21,000 go with out having done a thing wrong. That would be crazy.
Of course, you could not have gotten an AdSense account without signifying your agreement to a legally binding contract that specifically says you have no right to that $21,000, whether you did anything wrong or not.
But, I can't seem to find a definate answer to whether or not Google has the right to take back my earnings from March.
OK, that's troubling. In this day and age, you have got to be able to read a contract -- it's a basic life skill. You seem to be saying that even after all this has happened, you still can't interpret the Google TOS on this fairly straightforward point. I would say that means you need to engage a lawyer to help you before you click on any more "I Agree" buttons in your life.
was at $7,700 in February and in March it spiked to $21,000.
If nothing else, you've learned a valuable business lesson (perhaps even one that's worth $21,000!). When any critical number in your business plan changes by a factor of 3 within a month, you better stop the world and figure out precisely what's going on. While it's certainly true that sometimes a whole bunch of money just mysteriously lands in our lap for no good reason, more often it mysteriously lands in our lap for a reason that is no good.
What should I do besides the above?
Start digging into those weblogs and see if you can figure out why in the heck you would see a 300% change in anything in the space of a month. Figure out how you would prevent such fraud from going so far in the future. Try to figure out why Google would want to reenable your account -- just saying "gee, I didn't do anything wrong so let's try it again" is probably not going to be a compelling argument.
"I did not previously understand the likely signs and sources of fraud, I've identified the likely source in this case, and here are the controls I've instituted to try to prevent any future fraud from progressing." is the sort of thing that might have a better chance of attracting Google's interest in reinstatement.
does this mean that the $21,000 from March is going to be refunded?
While the "we can yank any payment we want" policy seems awfully scary and unfair from the AdSense side, I can attest that from the AdWords side of things, when you've watched someone drain a big chunk of change from your campaign account with clearly fraudulent clicks, it is a great relief to be able to get that money back (even though it gets yanked from some possibly hapless AdSenser's website who might have only unwittingly have provided the scene of the crime).
That $21,000 did not belong to you, did not belong to Google, but belonged to one or more advertisers who had a right to expect something in return for their money. Google, at their sole discretion (which you apparently agreed to abide by) has determined those advertisers did not get what they paid for. They deserve to get their money back.
If you absolutely positively did not participate in any way in any kind of click fraud -- well, neither did the AdSense advertisers. You're out some anticipated income. They're out actual cash.
I think running an AdSense website is getting to be more like running a pawn shop every day. Can the pawn shop be expected to know with 100% certainty that absolutely no item in their store was stolen goods? Of course not. But can the pawn shop expect to stay in business if they regularly seem to have a supply of new TVs everytime the local TV store gets burgled? Not if the cops are doing their job.
Good luck in getting re-instated. Let us know how it goes - it's always good for others to see how things work out, so they can learn from your experience.
