What have you done to reduce invalid traffic deductions?

[das_bends]

Hi all,

I have invalid traffic at around 5% each month, and looking to know how others have successfully reduced their invalid traffic. I'd mailed Adsense support and they'd told me which ad units were responsible for the most invalid traffic. So far I have :

- Increased space around ad units
- Added an "advertisements" label above the ad units
- Removed any ad units that are close to navigation
- Changed some responsive ads to fixed size ads to reduce "content jumping"
- Linked Adsense to Analytics - shows no suspect referrers (all my ads are behind login, so only referrers are google and fb)
- I already utilize Cloudflare and have been blocking several countries for years : China and others which are not target users for me.

Please do not post, "oh only 5% man, no big deal". Please post what steps you have taken and whether you feel/know they lead to a reduction.

thanks all and happy publishing.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

I do block all requests when the IP is from ASN which belongs to a Datacenter. (excepting legitimate Bots).

I also block requests based on UA.Missing, malformed, extremely old version. However, since I block DataCenter IP, I nearly have no more odd UA to block.

Result, 0% clawback, estimated earning == finalized earning.

[das_bends]

Thanks JorgeV, can you pls give a bit more detail?

1 - What was your deduction % before implementing these changes?
2 - Would you be able to share some code that you use for blocking? How do you detect Datacenters/malformed UA?

regards and thanks.

[not2easy]

Different sites have different traffic. It is not necessarily helpful to use a copy/paste answer for this situation. There are thousands of posts here about how it is done, but determining the traffic you wish to block is best done by examining your access logs, to see what kind of traffic you have and what you should be blocking.

See this thread for example: [webmasterworld.com...]

[tangor]

@das_bends ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

All mentioned above are part of the entire package of managing desired traffic v undesired traffic. Also bear in mind that g itself is not completely transparent on what might cause an "invalid traffic" in the first place, providing hints rather than specifics.

[Solution2]

I am trying to solve the problem of invalid traffic myself, at the moment. I don't know what has worked and what not, but these are things that I have implemented, after doing research.

I generally allow traffic that could cause Adsense's definition of invalid traffic, I just don't show Adsense ads to them, but affiliate program ads.

Bots
- I block untrustworthy bot useragents and some datacenter IP ranges in .htaccess
- Bots of value (Googlebot variations, Bingbot, etc.) get with each new IP they use an automated reverse DNS check as per their specification, and are allowed to see Adsense ads if they validate
- If the previously mentioned check indicates a spoof, they get a HTTP status 403
- Anything other that seems to be a bot, as from useragent string, headers, and such, doesn't get to see Adsense ads
- Any IP from various known datacenter IP ranges doesn't get to see the Adsense ads, as these are mostly bots, even though some legitimate visitors seem to come from there (VPN, probably); these include the IP ranges from Amazon AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud and several others

Real visitors
- Visitors coming from social media don't get to see the Adsense ads; from what I read on Google's Adsense forum, these are the biggest risk for mindlessly clicking around, which Adsense considers invalid traffic
- Visitors from countries with GDPR like privacy laws don't get to see the Adsense ads, as I prefer not to have the required modal dialog box
- Visitors from countries that I don't believe could have a legitimate interest in ads in the particular language section of my site that they are visiting, don't get to see the Adsense ads

(I previously had the username Solution1, since 2003, but I couldn't login with that one anymore.)

[tangor]

@Solution2 ... glad you're back!

[Solution1]

The things I mentioned in my post @Solution2 (and a few more) seem to have worked: only 0.23% deduction for invalid traffic, last month.