How do I detect if my ads have been receiving invalid clicks?
IanCP
12:51 am on Jul 29, 2015 (gmt 0)
Outside of Google AdSense themselves? I don't think anyone can say with any degree of certainty.
rlopes
2:54 am on Jul 29, 2015 (gmt 0)
I know there's a way of counting the clicks that Adsense receives with StatCounter and seeing how many clicks Adsense actually receives. If the difference is big then you would have many discounted clicks.
Also something about checking unusual robot activity in the logs.
not2easy
3:23 am on Jul 29, 2015 (gmt 0)
If you view your raw access logs you can learn to spot invalid activity over time. Visits that only request html files, without css or images is an example. Some have no User-Agent in the logs. Some only request an image or two. Some show your home page as their referer without ever visiting that page. It takes some poring over the logs or an agile script to make things obvious. Some appear to be human but only request robots.txt. Some will have improbable User-Agents or even pretend to be Googlebot from an IP that is all wrong. Just some examples, what you will see depends on your site and its traffic.
Many hosts offer analyzers of some flavor via control panel that can give you a rough idea of how rampant non-human activity is. To accurately analyze your logs involves time and patience. I don't know any simple way that is dependable and accurate.
