April 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[Mentat]

March was a UP/Down month for many, but was generally a quiet month.

April has "two Easters" (Catholic on 5th and Orthodox on 12), an official Google update on 21 (mobile algo) and probably the doorway pages update.

In the last yeast, Google rolled some big updates on holidays, so it's time to prepare yourself for a rough month.

[ember]

I am glad I built a custom ad class for google adsense. In a config file I can just switch to disable and all ads are removed from the site, instead of manually doing it, just for this occasion.

You can also just remove the site from the authorized site list while you get things under control. It's what the list is for - to protect your account.

Google doesnt block because google says its up the site owners to take care of invalid click issues.

The network is under constant attack. They block an awful lot but apparently not all. Spring is often particularly bad for attacks.

[Sillysoft]

Yes, but google states the site owner is responsible for taking care of invalid clicks. Though Im sure they also try blocking themselves.

Yes, I know you can go in adsense to do that, I have used it in the past for this very reason, but for just quick testing this feature works like a charm. I also enjoy building my own solutions, I have been a senior php developer for almost 15 years now.

[edited by: Sillysoft at 8:05 pm (utc) on Apr 19, 2015]

[netmeg]

I blocked xlhost a year ago because they sent so much badly behaved traffic. Probly why I'm not seeing anything that looks suspicious today (high earnings, but normal number of clicks - just the average EPC is way up - and no bot I ever saw can affect EPC) There is a setting in Analytics not to show bot traffic - you might have that set. Also, different bots do different things, and some execute javascript and some don't and some show up in Analytics and some don't.

Sillysoft - one thing to remember about click attacks is that there's safety in numbers. If it's just happening to YOU and it just happens to YOU over and over again, then you might have to worry about whether or not you're doing enough to fight the bots. But if you come here or some other forums and you see that a bunch of people are having the same problems at the same time - you're probably safe, because Google will eventually adjust for it. They'll take back some of the earnings, but your account is probably not at risk.

[chalkywhite]

Its noticeable in analytic s the boost in direct traffic also.

[AlexB77]

Here is the other one you might want to block as this one also does not do anything good to AdSense

xertive

I cannot find the IP, but will post it as soon as I find it.

[MrSavage]

Thanks everyone, the details here have been very helpful.

[chalkywhite]

Xertive -204.51.128.0/17 - sent me 14$ in the last hour. Blocked

[glitterball]

I'm seeing very high CTR and high value clicks on one site - guess it will all be clawed back.

[Broadway]

I having this problem today, CTR is doubled what it would be expected to be. Thanks for the IP addresses, I'll start off by blocking them.

[Broadway]

And thanks for the information about the Adsense invalid clicks reporting form, I'll look for that.

[Sillysoft]

This is the form to report invalid clicks:

[support.google.com...]

[System]

The following 14 messages were cut out to new thread by incredibill. New thread at: google_adsense/4744634.htm [webmasterworld.com]
4:29 pm on May 1, 2015 (PST -8)

[wasconet]

Im scared right now:

yesterday i changed the placement of one of my ads and today i noticed about 300% increment in my earnings and CTR was about 5.7%. i didnt want to believe its just that simple change today now CTR has gone to 9.8%.

Should i report to Google? everything else (pageview, traffic etc) looks normal

[ember]

i didnt want to believe its just that simple change today now CTR has gone to 9.8%.

That does seem high, although I have pages with higher ctr than that. Is there a reason for the higher ctr? A misleading placement maybe? If you are nervous, change the ad back to its original position or make sure that the new placement - too close to navigation or directly under a headline - isn't causing visitors to click by mistake.

[wasconet]

^ The ad (responsive display ad) is directly under my headline (post title). i will remove it now, but i have a very high CPC also, is that related to the high CTR?

Normally i do have only 1-3% CTR now up to 9%

[Broadway]

I'm having trouble understanding how once you know a host name, how you track down which IP's they are using.
Can I get that from Google Analytics since they are the ones reporting the name?

[kireb]

My traffic seems normal, CTR is 1 point higher, but RPM stands on 200%, which has never happened. I have a very stable traffic, CTR and RPM in general.
Please Google, shave those baddies off like you used to do!

[mediaase]

Thanks all. I had the same major spike in earnings from XLhost.com today. I banned 209.51.197.0/24 (all of my XLhost traffic was from 209.51.197.*). On another note, I looked at my google analytics traffic and noticed I've been getting traffic from XLhost starting on Feb 4, 2015 (all with 100% bounce rate) and the only adsense earnings from them was today. So banning that will hopefully help bounce rate averages as well.

[Erku]

I did contact adsense today. They will probably reply tomorrow.

[Ammalgam]

Yeah guys, my earnings today are 5 times higher than normal, RPM is 12 times higher and clicks are 6 x higher.

It's FUBAR today.

[virtualreality]

@Erku, please let us know what they say..

[virtualreality]

I wonder if there is something in common between all our sites that see this high CPT/ RPM today. My site is purely information. What about yours?

[Broadway]

I'm having the same difficulty.
I've blocked the IP's mentioned in this thread but it seems clicks are still getting through for XLHost and UKServers.com.

This is what's frustrating to me, via the information in this thread about Google Analytics I now know two ways to pick out the precise name of the host that is generating the invalid activity. But I have no effective way of identifying the IP involved.

In my case, the XLHost situation is only clicking on about 6 ads per hour. How can you identify in your logs the offending IP that only visited six times out of the many hundreds that visit per hour? That's a full time job for two people.
If GA can identify a host, why doesn't it make the IP available too?
When I look at the GA reports the offenders stick out like a sore thumb. Surely Adsense has this same information. Why isn't Adsense providing me with IP information?

[Sillysoft]

This is why I use awstats. It shows the top ip addresses that have traffic. Get the ip address, run it through a whois db, which is free online and it will tell you if its from xlhost.com. Then once you identify the ip that belongs to xlhost.com, ban it. I have cpanel, so I just go in there and block the ip that way.

[ken_b]

I found another xlhost ip in my stats tonite.

207.182.132.154

and another

207.182.128.210

[edited by: ken_b at 4:02 am (utc) on Apr 20, 2015]

[Sillysoft]

I went through each of my sites via Google Analytics and looked at the network. If any had xlhost.com I then went into awstats, identified the ips belonging to xlhost.com and then blocked the whole block. Not all of my sites had this problem, just a couple, but it wrecked havoc on my earnings, just skyrocketed the amount.

[virtualreality]

I looked in my AWSTATS reports but I dont see any single IP that might be causing the problem. Also how can the bots tell what is a text ad and what is a banner ad? It seems 99% of the clicks are on text ads.

[HowYesNo]

I have many sites but only one is being clickbombed, ctr 60% lol

[kireb]

What is weird that I receive a lot of high value clicks. My CTR is up by 30%, PV's seem alright, but CPC and RPM are out of whack. How can they be aiming almost only the high earning clicks?

[Vader1206]

Looks like in addition to XLHost, I'm getting clicks from "sta005" and "dedicated server hosting" as well as xertive. Those first two are the worst. Any ideas on IP ranges for them, to block too? This is getting really annoying and scary.