Confused about quality traffic. What is it?

[MrSavage]

I'm a bit confused. When I hear "quality traffic" I'm thinking the routes people took to come to my site. Adsense it talking about ensuring quality traffic. So we are talking about apples and oranges?

So in a sense, is there a quality dial that says a valid click is only a valid click if it results in our advertiser getting a sale, lead, pre order or email list signup? Otherwise that advertiser is given the money back for the click because that person clicking didn't cross this boundary of what is/isn't quality traffic? Is that what Adsense means with "quality" traffic? Could quality traffic be a click where a person spends more than (inserts time here) seconds on that advertisers site?

It's all pretty confusing to me. I'm looking at dwindling revenue and many more invalid clicks. So the question is what is quality traffic? Is it to my site, or is it the potential customers that I'm sending to the advertiser? Heck I see that the best situation for the advertiser would be in a world where they pay only for clicks that ended up in a sale. Is that the nirvana of "quality traffic" that we should all be seeking to come to our sites?

I think I know where this is going, but since there is Google representation, clarification would be beneficial.

[Play_Bach]

Thanks AdTrafficQuality (John). I guess my question really is, must a site running AdSense be globally accessible? If not and there are products like CloudFlare which make it possible to select what countries to show a site with AdSense, then why doesn't AdSense provide publishers the option to do this within our control panel since we're already able to see what countries ads are being shown? Thanks

[AdTrafficQuality]

As I'm not on the AdSense product team, I can't comment on specific country blocking features. However, it is good feedback, and I'll take this back to the team.

[Play_Bach]

Thanks John! It seems to me that products like CloudFlare are essentially offering an end run around the problem of showing AdSense in regions that make no sense for some sites. Since AdSense already provides publishers the countries that ads are being shown, then obviously serving or not serving ads by country is within the realm of possibility. Having a simple opt-in checkbox by each country would be nice. Thanks again

[netmeg]

I don't believe there are any requirements that your site has to be available globally.

[Play_Bach]

Thanks netmeg. I don't remember seeing such a clause either, but I'd rather know for certain that is the case.

[Dugger]

I don't see how there could be a problem. Since my sites are only targeting North America and a rash of intrusion attempts are coming from Eastern Europe for example it is really not an Adsense issue as to whether to block or not. It is matter of protecting your websites while remaining available and malware free for your target audience.

[Play_Bach]

Thanks Dugger. Are you using CloudFlare or something else to achieve this?

[Dugger]

No. There is now some automatic short term blocking that goes on at the server admin level when stuff is detected that shouldn't be happening and that stops a lot of bad traffic. Before that was set up I had a lot of server overloading issues resulting in downtime and that is really what forced me to look at manually blocking ip numbers. When I would check the error logs for visitors who were searching for vulnerabilities I would then check Arin to see where the IP was coming from and if there a lot of IP numbers in the same range causing problems then really the only way to stop the bad traffic is to block the whole range in .htaccess

Over a period of time you find that the vast majority of real and potential problems are generally coming from the same geographic areas and those areas are not North America.

[Play_Bach]

Thanks Dugger. I did the IP block in .htaccess a few years ago but gave up on it as it was too much of a hassle to maintain. I like the idea of CloudFlare or some other entity that's dedicated and more importantly, has the resources to monitor something as vast as IP ranges. Doing it via .htaccess myself just isn't my cup of tea, sorry.

[Dugger]

I don't really have to block with .htaccess anymore for the most part. It has become a rare event and the days of blocking ranges are long gone. The short term blocking at the server level solved my problems and keeps the bad guys away pretty well. I believe the program is called Config Security if I remember correctly - free with the hosting and available through WHM and Cpanel although you may need to ask for it to be turned on by your your hosting company.

[Play_Bach]

Is it ConfigServer?

[Dugger]

ConfigServer Security & Firewall