How to Protect Google AdSense from Invalid Activity

Monitoring your website's performance shouldn't be a chore but a necessity. After all, how else will you know how to serve your audience better - and acquire new ones - if you don't know how they get to you, what they do on your site and who they are? Google Analytics is a tool that does all that, but despite its sophistication, your account can be suspended for invalid activity.

This is the one thing that you have to avoid because the process of reinstating your account may take a while. That said, how can you detect invalid activity?

Before answering the question, here are some terms that you need to familiarize yourself with as they will appear throughout the rest of this post:

DEFINITIONS

• Clicks: number of times a user has clicked on your advertisements

• CPC: cost per click; what you get whenever a user clicks on your ads

• Pageviews: refers to the action the user takes of viewing a page with an ad displayed

• CTR: click-through rate; calculated as (clicks/pageviews) x 100 and is given in percentage

• Estimated Earnings: calculated as (clicks x CPC); the value goes up or gown while the earnings are still in the verification process

What is Invalid Activity?

The clicks on the ads made by the publishers itself or by anyone for the sake of publisher’s benefits such increase in revenue or publishers’ lose such a getting his/her AdSense account banned is called invalid activity.

There are different ways of which invalid activity can happen on a publisher’s site. Some most common reason for invalid activity is listed below.

• A publisher may ask someone to click on his/her ads.

• He/She may place Ad units on those places where users will click unintentionally.

• They may write some words like 'Support us by clicking below', 'our best sites' anything of this kind to encourage regular users to click on the ads.

• They may use automated programs to do this.

• They may edit the ad code to make the uses fool and get clicks on ads.

• All such type of actions which can be performed by a publisher or his/her rivals is included in Invalid activity by AdSense.

Below video by Google AdSense can help you understand the invalid activity quickly.

Ways to Detect Invalid Activity in Google AdSense

• You have a CTR above 20%. The normal range for CTR is 1% to 11%, but anything above these tells Google that there is something iffy and that may not bode well for you. So, if you notice this, make necessary changes so that you maintain a healthy CTR.

• You have a lot of clicks but no CPC. As in, your assigned CPC is 0.00. For example, if you get about 50 clicks and don't have a CPC set, that tells Google that something funky is going on and they will not hesitate to take action. Keep in mind that they do take matters like this seriously, and which is why they employ both human and machine checking to analyze clicks and impressions.

• Your estimated earnings rise then fall suddenly. For example, you get estimated earnings of $1.00 but the next minute this drops to $0.0. Whether it drops to zero or half the original estimated earnings amount after you refreshed the page, you know that something is up.

• You have many clicks from one country but less pageviews. Google operates on the belief that if a user clicked on an ad, they are interested in what it has to say. So, if the pageviews are really low, that sends a wrong signal to Google and causes them to think that something fishy is happening.

How Does Google Find Invalid Activity?

Google is brilliant at all. They have great algorithms for checking the publisher’s sites and the activities on their sites.

According to Google, they use real-time detection and filtering algorithms to detect invalid activity.

They examine each click on ads and look at many points for every click made on your ads which include the time when a user clicked the ad, the number of clicks one user made, and many more things of this kind.

After that, they analyze these factors to filter out any invalid clicks before showing you reports.

Moreover, the Google AdSense team is continuously improving their algorithms to find invalid activity so that they can keep their ecosystem safe and sound.

Why Google Disable AdSense Publishers For Invalid Activity?

This question must be popping up in your mind that at least what is the reason that Google Disables it’s publishers’ accounts. As all the publishers are giving about 32% of their AdSense earnings to Google, it means that if you earn $100 then you are just getting $68 and Google is taking $32 from you.

Well, the reason behind disabling publisher's accounts is that Google is charging advertisers for showing their products as advertisements on different blogs and websites. So, it’s the responsibility of Google to provide it’s advertisers with quality and the best targeted traffic, so their money doesn’t be wasted.

When Google notices that you are clicking on your ads yourself or someone else is doing this for revenue they just ban your AdSense account and take all your earnings back to fill the advertisers lost.

How Can you Find Invalid Clicks on your site?

If you are worried about invalid clicks and you think that someone is making invalid clicks on your ads, then it’s important to monitor your site and AdSense account and find out that either someone is doing click bombing on your AdSense or not.

If you see something strange in your AdSense account, then it’s possible that someone has just started doing invalid clicks on your site.

You can get an idea about invalid activity on your site by Click Through Rate (CRT) and Cost Per Click (CPC).

If you see a low CPC for a country like the USA or Canada or any other first world country and a high CRT on ads, then I can bet that someone is doing an invalid activity on your site. For example, if the average CPC of your ads fro the USA is $1 and you see a CPC of $0.3 or $0.8 and a high CRT of 30-50% then it’s simply that someone has just made some invalid clicks.

Moreover, if you see a sudden increase in the number of clicks and the traffic is the same then all these things point to invalid activity on your site.​

Final Thoughts on How to Protect AdSense From Invalid Activity

Protecting your AdSense from the invalid activity may be a bit harder, but if you follow the tips which I have shared above, then you can easily keep your AdSense safe from ad clickers.

All you need to keep patience and understand the things and how to deal with them. And Don't worry if AdSense has already banned you due to Invalid Activity.

If you have any questions or suggestions, then you can ask me by posting your valuable comments. And please share this blog post with your social communities too.

I hope you like this article if you guys did share this with your friend and if you have any query drop a comment in the comment section below.


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