Confirmed Click / Double Click penalty

[janvitos]

Hi,

So I've recently started getting hit by the Confirmed Click / Double Click penalty. I've never had this penalty before and haven't made any changes to my website's design.

The penalty means people are shown a small popup when they click an ad and need to confirm they really want to be taken to the ad's website. This popup creates confusion for the user and they often end up tapping "No" even if they wanted to view the ad. So basically, you lose around 50% of your clicks and revenue while the penalty is enforced.

I've already contacted AdSense Support and they simply mentioned to review my ad implementation on mobile, which I did and found absolutely no issues. I've been having more viral articles than usual recently and noticed a boost in CTR since the traffic is mostly coming from new users. But this is something I can't control at all.

What I'm thinking is AdSense maybe recently started to get stricter with CTR fluctuations and are now penalizing quicker than before.

I would be curious to know if anyone else got this penalty and if so, what you did to fix the issue.

Thank you.

[lammert]

The double click option is used to prevent accidental clicks on the ads. Check which ads are close to navigation elements on your pages and try to better separate them from the ads.

[janvitos]

Thanks for your comment lammert. This has already been thoroughly verified by our experts and there are no implementation issues at all.

Like I said previously, nothing has changed in our design in a while and we never had this penalty before. To me, it seems like Google might have changed something in the way they detect accidental clicks and are now detecting false positives.

It isn't unusual at all for Google to break something while trying to fix things.

[lammert]

Well, if your "experts" say that nothing is wrong, and you are just looking here for acknowledgement of your own theory, I would advice you to just accept your reduced income. Google won't change anything on their side to fix your earnings problem. You have to fix it yourself.

[janvitos]

I'm not looking for acknowledgement. I'm actually looking for suggestions (like yours, which was already verified, as I mentioned), and other people that might be experiencing the same issue.

I think Google MIGHT actually change things on their end if enough users come forward with this issue. But if no one else experiences the issue, then it might confirm something is wrong with my account or my website. But then again, I've already talked to an AdSense support agent and have gone over many times the different disallowed and recommended ad implementations.

As I mentioned previously, I do get a boost in CTR when articles go viral, but that is expected and has never caused issues in the past. So that's why I think there might have been modifications on Google's end that are making the algo stricter in enforcing penalty for CTR boosts. But a CTR boost is NOT necessarily synonymous of accidental clicks.

[lammert]

An influx of new visitors causing an increase in CTR is not uncommon. Part of these visitors may not be interested in your content and for them, ads are just an exit-route to another destination. Repeat visitors on the other hand are on the site for your content, rather than searching for the exit. Increase of CTR due to new users by itself should therefore not be the direct cause of this penalty.

Another thing you could look into is how the pages build up on slow connections. If a page loads in multiple steps and content is shifted to different locations during this process, ads may pop around on the page before the layout is stable. This moving of ads may also be the cause of the penalty. For developers on high speed connections this one is often difficult to detect as the browser renders the end-result almost immediately on their screen.

[NickMNS]

I do get a boost in CTR when articles go viral

This is sounds spurious to me, a rapid increase in overall users increases supply of the available ad inventory, thus leading to less well targeted ads. As a result when traffic increases rapidly one expects CTR to fall.

What @lammert says in the last post make sense, a rapid increase in traffic can cause your server to slow, pair that with an already slow mobile connections and the result will be a laggy page load. You should investigate this. There is a feature in Chrome Dev-tools that allows you to simulate a slow connection, try that and see how your pages load.

Have you been subjected to high clawback for invalid click at the end of the months?

[JorgeV]

Hello,

haven't made any changes to my website's design.

It's also possible a "problem" was already existing, and you were just not yet caught by the system.

our experts

Your experts, or yourself, are not in the best position, to judge if ads are positioned in an appropriate and non misleading way. The reason being that, you are in use of your page layout, and you placed things as you think is good. But visitors might have a totally different perception of your page layout.

On a mobile device, you might assume that ads are not taking too much room, but this is wrong. On a small screen even a 300x250 ad is easily "accidentally" tapped, when someone is just trying to scroll the page.

If you observe a lost of income, because of a Double Click requirement, it's the proof that this is accidental clicks. If a visitor is interested by an ad, he will validate his intention to click/tap. In that case, it's the proof Adsense is right, to have set up this double click security.

So, I would suggest you to take people not familiar with your site, and ask them opinion.

Now, from a technical point of view, if it's not yet the case, you should check your Cumulative Shift Layout score. This is one of these new barbarian word, which appeared recently.

[janvitos]

Thank you all for your help and advice.

Core Web Vitals are all passing and have been passing for many months. CLS is at 0 and I've confirmed this by checking with Core Web Vitals in Chrome Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights and CloudFlare Browser Insights.

I've invested quite a bit of resources in this website making sure it is respecting every Google / Facebook policy. It is also very fast, even for slower connections, using a dual cache system and CloudFlare's various optimization technologies. So in essence, I know the problem *most probably* does not lie within design or speed of the website.

I do suspect that something is triggering Google's invalid click algo whenever I get a viral article on Facebook with new users that boosts the CTR. But again, I've had viral articles like this for years, it's nothing new. What's new though is the Confirmed Click penalty.

My reasoning behind the CTR boost with new users is that they will enter a new website and see new ads that will be more interesting to them than repeat users. Remember, targeted ads basically don't work inside the Facebook / In-App / WebView Browser, so users only get to see context-based ads.

[NickMNS]

Nobody here is accusing you of anything. Sincerely, I'm certain that your website is excellent and that you and your team have truly done a great job.

Core Web Vitals are all passing and have been passing for many months. CLS is at 0 and I've confirmed this by checking with Core Web Vitals in Chrome Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights and CloudFlare Browser Insights.

It is great that your site's score is high on these tools, it certainly provides a beneficial user experience for most of your users most of the time. But there is a problem with these tools, they are unable to provide you insight into what occurs in the edge cases. Your problem, as you have described it occurs at an edge:

I've been having more viral articles than usual recently and noticed a boost in CTR since the traffic is mostly coming from new users.

Unusually high traffic, new users, on mobile. You need to simulate this situation, if for no other reason than to be able to rule it out completely with certainty. It doesn't take much, one div that has it's rendering delayed is sufficient to make an ad suddenly appear in a place where a button or link used to be. It could even be the ads themselves causing the issue. And again, it doesn't take much, this could only affect 1% of your users, but given the high traffic conditions this could add up to a sufficiently high volume invalid clicks that it triggers the penalty.

To end I will direct you back to @lammerts second post, this is a very wise advise:

Google won't change anything on their side to fix your earnings problem. You have to fix it yourself.

[janvitos]

So while digging around, I found something rather interesting.

Here's the CTR for different creative sizes of the same ad unit with the highest CTR on my website:

Dynamic 1.83%
300x250 0.28%
336x280 0.26%

And here's the CTR for the same creative sizes for all ads on my website:

Dynamic 1.42%
300x250 0.25%
336x280 0.25%

As you can see, the dynamic creative size has an incredibly high CTR compared to 300x250 and 336x280.

So while I scratched my head over those stats, I remembered that I turned ON the "Let Google optimise the size of your mobile ads" setting a few days ago, which coincides with the moment I started noticing the Confirmed Click penalty. What I suspect is that the setting in question is probably showing 300x600 ads (or other huge formats for mobile) that are generating accidental clicks. Unfortunately, since I only see "Dynamic" for the creative size, I cannot confirm this with certainty, but I'm pretty sure that setting is the culprit.

I have now turned the "Let Google optimise the size of your mobile ads" setting OFF and will wait and see if I notice any improvement over the coming days and weeks. I will also keep a close eye on the dynamic creative size CTR.

If turning off that setting ends up being the solution, it will be pretty ironic indeed. The reason I turned it on in the first place is because I received a recommendation from Google in AdSense telling me to activate it to optimize my revenue.

[janvitos]

By digging even further, I was able to pinpoint exactly when the problem started and when I turned ON the problematic AdSense setting.

February 22nd: Dynamic CTR 0.59%
February 23rd: Dynamic CTR 1.46%

Before February 23nd, dynamic CTR was always way below 1%, hovering around 0.50%. On and after February 23rd, dynamic CTR has always been over 1.40%, except for the days where I got the Confirmed Click penalty. On those days, dynamic CTR felt to 0.20% or below because of the confirmation popup.

[NickMNS]

Looks like you found the solution to the problem. Let us know what the outcome is.

[janvitos]

Well it seems my assumptions were wrong. I believe I am the victim of click bombing.

Some countries like Spain and United States have a CTR of 100%+. Some ad units have more clicks than impressions, and some long removed ad units are receiving clicks.

I have written again to Google about this, but I doubt they will be able to help me.

Anyone here has any experience in dealing with click bombs?

I have taken a look at my server logs and have a hard time finding a pattern.

[janvitos]

So I've spent the day anaylizing my stats related to the different ads and their CTR, and I'm starting to think the high CTR issue might be related to a performance opimization that was put in place recently on my website.

Without affecting the design of the website or implementation of the ads, we have recently started defering the CSS and various JS files. Although our tests on most popular browsers and platforms were successful and revealed absolutely no anomalies regarding this modification, it seems like our website's rendering might have actually been broken on certain versions of the Facebook In-App Browser.

Unfortunately, we were never able to reproduce the issue. All the devices we used to display our website in the Facebook Browser rendered our website properly. But since the CTR is over 50%-80% on most articles on that Browser only, it is almost certain that our website was NOT rendering properly (maybe the CSS was not loading?) for some users and that only the ads were being shown on screen.

So basically, we reverted the performance optimizations to what they were before we started getting the high CTR and Confirmed Click penalty and will wait until tomorrow to see if things improve.

[janvitos]

So I'm still in the process of trying to figure out the problem.

As I mentioned, I've reverted the optimization changes and did notice a drop in CTR, but it is still really high for some browsers.

Please have a look at the data below. First row is the article name, second row is the browser, third row is the publisher impressions and fourth row is the CTR.

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Safari (in-app) (Facebook iOS)
9,348
1.01%

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Android Webview (Facebook Android)
7,045
37.30%

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Chrome
1,526
7.01%

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Safari
758
0.26%

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Firefox
244
3.28%

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Edge
171
1.17%

/enseignante-maternelle-demissionne-raisons-jessica-gentry/
Samsung Internet
143
41.96%

As you can see, the problem seems to affect only specific browsers: Android Webview (Facebook Android) and Samsung Internet. Chrome has a relatively high CTR, but nothing compared to Android Webview. Strangely enough, Safari (in-app) (Facebook iOS) has one of the lowest CTRs of the bunch.

Right now, I have no idea what to do next other than wait for my optimization change reversal to propagate through caches and hope for the best.

If anyone has any suggestion as to what I could do or look for next, I would be really happy to hear it.

Thanks.

Edit: After comparing the data between AdSense and Google Analytics, I noticed the CTR and number of clicks is MUCH higher in Google Analytics. For example, on one day, AdSense reports 1,956 clicks while Google Analytics reports 42,118 clicks. So as much as those numbers might be useful to draw comparisons, I believe the clicks and percentages themselves are not representative of what they are in real life. Unless AdSense is wrong, but I doubt that. I would be really crious to know why there is such a discrepancy between AdSense and Google Analytics.