Massive Difference in Reported and Actual Earnings

In December, the deductions seem pretty high

[dhaliwal]

Hi Everyone,

I am not sure, if others have also noticed the same issue.

For the month of December, on monthly earnings of $7500, Google has deducted nearly $200.

Every month, there was a small difference of say $20-50 in the estimated earnings and the actual (audited) earnings, but this month, it seems that Google has cut more (maybe they wanted to report higher earnings to SEC).

I wanted to ask, if anyone else has noticed similar thing ?

[indyank]

Oh...I just looked at it again for dec and it is way down than what it was earlier...what is happening google? this really sucks...

[incrediBILL]

Sure, we've heard of a similar thing:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Problem was the issue was so bad on his site they banned him from Google.

If all they did was deduct $200 from your account from possible click fraud and you didn't get any notice or anything, count your blessings.

First thing I would do, if you haven't already, go into Account Settings and specify all your domain names in "Access and authorization" to make sure people aren't messing with your AdSense codes outside of your control.

[ElvisFan]

I have been losing money every month for the last year with monthly adjustments... sometimes a lot... sometimes a little... but I'm always the loser...

Makes me wonder who pockets the difference?

[indyank]

oh sorry for all the trouble...I was in a hurry in jumping at google as usual :)

I was comparing revenue for one site with another one by mistake.So I am not noticing anything different from what was reported earlier.

Sorry once again folks and sorry google :)

[BillyS]

I have been losing money every month for the last year with monthly adjustments... sometimes a lot... sometimes a little... but I'm always the loser...

Makes me wonder who pockets the difference?

The person that didn't pay Google. Some of it is bad debt expense.

[netmeg]

Makes me wonder who pockets the difference?

Supposedly the advertiser. And since I run the AdWords for a bunch of clients, I will tell you that pretty much every month I have money credited back to me on each account for invalid clicks. Of course, I have no way of determining if the amount credited is equal to the amount taken back from the publishers (and it wouldn't surprise me if Google kept some for administrative costs and profit) but there it is. And there was one month where the fraud was so obvious when I looked at the publisher's site, that I reported it to Google and got about $900 back for my client just off that one site.

Google adjusted me three cents last month. The most I've ever been adjusted in a single month is about twenty bucks. If you are repeatedly seeing lots of significant adjustments, then I would advise you look to the sources of your traffic. Google's never come out and said they have a traffic quality score, but Yahoo and Bing do, and I would be kind of amazed if Google didn't. If I started receiving (either on purpose or for no good reason) a bunch of click-happy Chinese traffic on my Michigan-oriented sites, I would expect it wouldn't be too long before Google decided my sites were a risk to advertisers (whether intentional or not) and cut me out of the program. And they'd be right to do it.

[incrediBILL]

If you are repeatedly seeing lots of significant adjustments, then I would advise you look to the sources of your traffic.

I've been adjusted a few cents here and there but never anything substantial.

If they took off a serious amount of money, like Netmeg said, I'd be looking for any unusual traffic spikes that might account for some click fraud and deal with it ASAP.

[gmb21]

Where do we find the report of adjustments? Would it be in the "Payment History", "details" section?

[Rodeo]

There's no specific report for adjustments, just the raw difference between the supposedly previous months earnings (by running a normal report for previous month) and finalized previous months earnings shown in Payment history.
My difference for Dec is around $2 and on average the difference hovers between $ 1-5 every month.

[mibrahim]

I have the same problem as dhaliwal, but dec was $800 less & Nov was $500 less. I know that sometimes labs in public schools use my website during teaching lab sessions, so sometimes one IP may be resulting in a lot of traffic. I don't know if that would be a reason for all of that money. 90% of my traffic come from organic searches, while around 10% returning. I don't buy traffic from any where else - no facebook, no craigslist nothing of that type. The ad units that generate most of the income are in the same exact spot for more than a year and a half and I never saw revised earnings that much low.