Forum Moderators: martinibuster
As background info, this is a small hobby site of mine. I have about 1000 ad views per day (I only chose to display ads on certain pages). The CTR has been extremely high. I do not employ any dirty tricks and I am complying with the TOS.
The bottom line is that I do not know the cause of the invalid clicks. I have NEVER clicked on my ads from my computer or any other computer and of cource I have never told or hired anybody to do so. I have a dial-up connection via aol in the UK therefore I do not have a fixed IP address.
Nobody exept from me has access to my computer and I have never logged-in to my adsense account from any other computer. I haven't told any friends or family know about adsense and after enquiring, they have never clicked on the ads.
I have sent an email to Google explaining the situation but haven't heard back from them. Until the issue is resolved, I have removed all the ads from my pages because I do not want to lose the money generated (not a huge amount but, still, why lose it).
Do have a good read through the entire TOS, and follow it up with the FAQ and Policies, and make sure there isn't something you are accidentily violating that can cause invalid clicks.
I do not label the ads or employ anything else that is against the AdSense policies.
The only issue I can think of is my dynamic IP address. The visitors are highly likely to have similar IP adresses since the topics on the pages cover my geographic area.
And always remember that machines ARE stupid and DO make mistakes because it's us humans that tell them what to do.
Well the stat's include invalid clicks - I know I haven't self click and have observed four. Leading me to the belief that invalid clicks is not just self clicks.
Is it a possiblity that someone is being helpful? Maybe a supporter of your site or member?
Could be that Google isn't paying for clicks through public proxy servers.
Could be that Google doesn't pay for clicks from certain countries, although I would have thought this would be spelled out in the TOS.
Could be due to clicks from IP addresses previously associated with fraudulent activity.
One for the conspiracy theorists, could be that Google has a few "secret shopper" sites which they use to monitor traffic patterns AFTER the clickthrough.
Unfortunately AdSenseAdvisor conspicuously declined to answer what kind of clicks get filtered out as invalid.
Stands to reason. Why should Google make life easier for the bad guys?
Unfortunately, as it has been mentioned here already we just don't know what or how they detect "invalid clicks".
Also, the opinion of fellow webmasters and $10 will get you lunch, which is another way to see it really does not matter. It is Google's opinion that matters.
