Forum Moderators: martinibuster
You can use various methods to gather some click data. These have disadvantages: they slow down visitor access, they cannot correctly identify all ad clicks, they may violate TOS if implemented the wrong way. Finally, they cannot have any knowledge of "offline" click frauding, such as is more likely to be done by automated attacks (as opposed to paying people in 3rd-world countries to click on your ads).
There's just no way to detect and try to defend against any but the most obvious, brute-force click-fraud attacks on your website. Anyone who wants to pay for a botnet attack can get you banned at any time. The one-and-only defense is the low odds that someone wants to expend the effort and engage in what could get classified as criminal activity just to get someone else banned.
However, we're already seeing knowledge of banning as a weapon beginning to spread among the technically literate. By the end of 2007, there should be no universities free of students who know how to get their professor banned from AdSense by going to the computer lab (or the public library one town over) and banging away on ads.
The interesting question is, how many Bad Guys producing automated bans is required to make the current system collapse?
I predict a "nuclear event" for AdSense sometime within the next 5 years. At some point, somebody with a >20,000 zombie army and a grudge against Google (or a criminal ring wanting to demonstrate why Google should hand them big $$ for "protection") is going to decide to see if they can bring the Google advertising network to its knees. If they're even slightly smart about how they do it, I think they'll succeed. The fallout will be a cascade of automated bannings, followed by advertiser refunds, and a sweeping loss of faith in the system. That may be how the CPC model finally ends.
The OP is advertising their site. They're worried that if his/her advertising efforts are successful and bring in lots of visitors, if this could trigger a review or a banning.
My answer is no. Advertising traffic is natural. I'm pretty sure Google tracks the keywords being used to access your site, and where it's coming from. A spike from advertising can be accounted for.
So long as your creative doesn't encourage people to click on ads or support your site by visiting your sponsors, stuff like that, then you should be fine.
I'm speaking from personal experience. My income for that single day spiked 700%.
I second this. I have had one of my sites featured on radio and the spike was tremendous! :)
No negative repercussions, (God I can't spell, somebody help me..)
in fact the traffic never went back to normal, it did taper back down to normalish (is that a word?) but always did better afterwords.
I also ran a good adwords campaign and spiked traffic tremendously and never heard a word.
