What to do About Suspicious Click Activity With Adsense

This morning I started browsing stats along with my daily check of email and saw adsense reporting a very high number of clicks for this site with very few visitors. It was much beyond the clickthrough rate that I normally see and was obvious that one visitor was click happy. Fortunately I wasn't credited with any money from those clicks and then started to dig deeper into my stats tracking. I found the IP address and the referrer and also found some tracking of the time that ads were clicked. (The IP was located in Inda and I have more detail but will not discuss it here.)

Since this was out of the ordinary I reported it to Google adsense via the form they have for suspicious click activity. (Here is their invalid clicks contact form. You might also notice that I've disabled the ads here for the present time. I don't know if that was necessary or not, but would rather be safe than sorry and see continued attempts at click fraud against my account. I may do the same for all of my lower traffic sites until they reach a certain traffic threshold. I haven't decided on that yet.

Another resource you may be interested in if you are also an adsense publisher and have had unusual traffic and click activity is to look at the Adsense help resource guide on the topic "Invalid Click Issues and Concerns". I hope by being proactive in this I (and others) can help to protect their accounts from people that either target someone out of spite, ignorance or who knows what other motivation.

It's sad to think it, but I suspect sour grapes could be the motivation for this and it is one reason that I've disabled ads for the time being. I've had several correspondences with people asking for advice about their adsense account or why they haven't been approved by adsense and I recall telling more than one that it was because they were quite flagrantly in violation of the terms of adsense. Some people don't seem to take the truth well even if it's meant constructively. I've run into this once before years ago when I had a site hacked and deleted within a day of having someone contentiously argue over advertising rates. Some people can be spiteful and unfortunately they overshadow those that aren't simply because their actions can cause such frustration and consume so much of your time.

That much said.... it makes me wonder if there is an easy way to block adsense from loading for specific ip addresses (or blocks of addresses)? That would be one way to go ahead and block of "bad neighborhoods" and prevent certain visitors from being consistent sources of problems (unless they were sophisticated enough to bypass via tor or other means of cloaking a source ip.)

A tracking cookie + maybe some sort of javascripting that acted as an advertising "kill switch" for a user that was too click happy might be a possibility, but I wouldn't know how to accomplish this. I have seen some plugins that claim to protect your site ads from multiple clicks and may be looking into those and seeing how they dovetail with the adsense guidelines.

TO summarize, I have always done everything possible to play within the rules of adsense. I have always tried to avoid even the appearance of anything close to infringing on their rules and hope that I have done what I needed to in this case. I also hope that you never have the misfortune of having one of your sites targeted by someone for click happiness, but if you do I hope that this article may help give you some ideas as to how you can deal with it.

I'll also be updating you if I hear anything back from google regarding this incident. (Although I may not hear anything from them according to the information they provide on the form.)

--Update-- 2:25pm

I have done a bit of looking around and found over at jensense.com a summary of the policies from Google on protecting your account from invalid clicks. Among the things that she notes is that Google officially discourages the use of 3rd party software to protect their ads because it may divulge sensitive information or may prevent the legitimate display of ads. (I recall seeing some buzz about a 3rd party script that was supposed to help protect against multiple clicks I think now this may be the same software that she mentions early in the article. Frankly if they were spamming adsense users with fake disabled account notices - they must be slimey.)

Also she notes that one of their tips is to be careful about the places that traffic is purchased from (pay per click ads/etc.) At this time, I do not purchase traffic for any of my sites that have adsense on them mainly for the reason taht the quality of traffic is typically poor (which in turn makes for uninterested people clicking links and that means poor return on investment for the advertisers and is essentially the recipe for being smartpriced.)

Note to all - SEARCH traffic is the best most targeted. If you do get pay per click traffic to your site, make sure that it is closely targeted to the search terms relevant to your landing pages or you will find that things will not work out well for you. (1) You'll waste advertising money, 2) you wont do well with your ads for the long term. Who knows, day one may look good, but after that things will likely take a turn for lower earnings per click.)