Avoiding Click fraud for Adsense

My Adsense account is falling culprit of click fraud

[pankajj]

We started Adsense across our portal. Since ours internal employee size is +150 and everyone has free access to internet, it may happen that they go to our own website and click on some adsense links.
I received a mail from adsense that our accounts seems to be drawing fraud clicks.
Can you suggest me some measures that can even aviod any such un-intentional acts from the employees..

[Bddmed]

Block the ads maybe?

[pankajj]

Blocking the ad's to be displayed internally will also mean, when we intent to surf google.com, the ad's will not show up, please suggest..

[Bddmed]

Since you're running a portal I would think it is based on some sort of dynamic technology.
Do the blocking from within the site/server for your site only for your IP(s) only.

[netmeg]

If you can't keep your employees from clicking the ads, then maybe AdSense is not a good choice for you.

[koan]

If you can't block ads by IP (you could block your whole city), try to use a cookie system for internal employees.

[londrum]

presumabely you control which browser your employees are using. you could just change it's user_agent name to something unique to you, and block the ads from appearing for that.

[skweb]

Shouldn't a memo to your employee tell them what not to do? You have to explain your business model to them and tell them the importance of your AdSense account. And if an occasional employee is genuinely interested in an ad and clicks on it then it is not a fraudulent click. Maybe you have unhappy employees trying to destroy your business. Plz investigate the problem because as you describe it it does not make sense.

[StoutFiles]

And if an occasional employee is genuinely interested in an ad and clicks on it then it is not a fraudulent click.

Yeah...try explaining that to Google. Your best bet is to block them in general.

[Quadrille]

Your employees need to be aware that they are risking their jobs, not 'helping'.

It's a matter of better education - or better employee selection ;)

Adsense TOS are never negotiable; it is not Google's money that they are defrauding, but Google's clients' money. And Google will defend their clients (or lose them).

EVERY click from you (or your agents - ie employees), is a fraudulent click. Be quite clear on that.

[tim222]

Shouldn't a memo to your employee tell them what not to do? You have to explain your business model to them and tell them the importance of your AdSense account.

That's asking for trouble. Out of 150 employees there's bound to be at least one miscontent who would use that information to really mess things up.

That being said, an organization that size needs control over their employees' computer usage. Even the simplest firewall will let you block googlesyndication.com. If that means they can't see any ads at all, then that's a minimal side effect. It's difficult to imagine how being able to see advertisements could benefit a business in general.

[johnnie]

Why can't you just block your own IP range from seeing the google ads on your page? Tat's not too hard is it?

[mmontala]

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci

There is add on for firefox browsers that can block script. It's called "NoScript" and you can search it in the net.

For Internet explorer users, you can simply:

Step 1: Click on Internet Explorer icon on the desktop.
Step 2:Goto
Tools > Internet Options > Security Tab > Restricted Sites > On the right side click "sites" button. Then add the URL of your website.

Most employees won't play around with the settings so you will worry less about that. If they are curious as a cat, then maybe you can tweak their windows account to limit their functions to change settings.

[jetteroheller]

I insert the AdSense code by SSI

Instead of AdSense code, I insert Amazon depending on

IP-Address
Browser (all the other notebooks in my family have a manipulated agent string)

[Juan_G]

An old thread on this topic ("hosts" file, etc.):

Preventing Adsense Clicks by Home Network Users [webmasterworld.com]
How to make AdSense safe family notebooks

[Key_Master]

If your employees are on a shared network, and you can block partial url requests at the router, a quick fix is to block any outbound requests with "&client=ca-pub-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" in the url (where ca-pub-zzz* represents your publisher id).

This should work with text links and image ads. I'm not sure about rich text media or videos but it would be easy enough to figure out.

[edited by: Key_Master at 5:46 pm (utc) on July 12, 2008]