Google Adsense Click Fraud Attempts?
September 20, 2007
Stumble it!How do you tell when someone is doing click fraud on your site?
Today I logged in and found a page of mine had 17 impressions, and 18 clicks! That doesn’t seem right. I do have two ad banners, so maybe someone was looking at all of the ads? It just looks a little fishy.
Would this be a sign of click fraud, and how do you even protect against it?
(I will do some searching in the past posts)
Thanks,
Christian
The amateur fraud should be obvious by inspection. Unusual volume focused on a minority of pages. Repeat traffic from the same IP address or same subnet. Ask your web analysis software for traffic sorted by IP address (or, preferably, subnet since that will be equivalent for most small sites and non-fraud traffic). Look at the top few sources and see if they are fishy.
Probably the best thing you can do is read a simple stats tutorial and learn what the standard variance of your key statistics are, so you don’t get into a tizzy over “unusual” numbers that are actually well within 2 standard deviations of normal for your website. See the recurring threads of the form “My Traffic/Clicks/Earnings Have Plunged Today!” for good examples of folks who have no idea how much variance is in their numbers normally.
When you are suspecting about some fraud clicks, the best thing you should do is email Google and tell them what is happening and why you think there are fraud clicks in your site.
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September 21st, 2007 at 1:45 am
The thing about click fraud is that you don’t need to really worry about it as Google will take care of it. Of course this is a double edged sword as Google won’t tell you about the click fraud unless they are about to ban you.
I’ve never tried to analyse my stats to highlight click fraud as it would just take too much time
Becky
September 21st, 2007 at 1:50 am
Becky,Thank you for commenting here. About your comment, I think that google adsense members should really worry about it. There are many publishers that have been banned without any previous email.
Google Adsense team will check if your account hae been providing invalid clicks and they inmediatly block your account, then after publishers contact them 90% of the time they will not get any reply and is done your google adsense account is banned for ever. That’s why is good to analyse your clicks and if you see anything that is not normal inmediatly email them and tell them about the issue.
September 21st, 2007 at 4:07 am
But checking each of these clicks, can be a big task in itself. I don’t think that I could spend the time looking at these types of things. What do you suggest to track them down ?
Becky
September 21st, 2007 at 8:11 pm
You can analyse it like this:
- If you have 2 impression and 18 clicks for sure this is a fraud, someone trying to make your adsense blocked.
- If you see a higher CTR than other days when you did not ran any advertising campaign or you didn’t get listed at the top of digg.
I have heard that there are many third-party tools around but it is costly for small publishers. Small publishers I mean compared with all Google adsense publishers.
September 22nd, 2007 at 2:14 am
one question remain, if we report our suspicion on click fraud, will google really consider it as an honest report and take action in our side?
September 22nd, 2007 at 5:02 am
Google will check your account and click activity and see if there is really click fraud on it, then take actions. In a business point of view, if I have an employee reporting that someone else is doing fraud or is stealing in my company, I will investigate it and if it is true or not I will thanks the employee.
September 22nd, 2007 at 5:52 am
what about the earning produced by fraud click?
September 22nd, 2007 at 6:46 am
it will be reducted from your account
September 26th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I read this post with interest, I investigate click fraud from the publishers perspective when they are fraudulently trying to make money but not when someone is attacked by someone trying to get another persons adsense account suspended.
Google have a click fraud alerting process. This can be found at the link below, but this is more inclined towards the adwords advertiser than the adsense publisher.
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?clickquality=1&ctx=clickquality
September 26th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Thanks Neil, for this information. by the way, I edited your post because you added a comma in your site instead of a point.
October 4th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
[...] click fraud attempt in your adsense account contact Google inmediatly read my previous post about Google Adsense Click Fraud Attempts? and Google adsense id has been [...]