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How to protect your Google Adsense account from ‘Accidental Clicks’

May 31, 2006

Many site owners get their adsense accounts terminated due to ‘invalid clicks’ arising from accidental clicks by the site owners.

Whereas it’s much easier for Google to detect invalid clicks from the Site Owner’s geographic location, its very difficult and sometimes almost impossible to assign blame when the fraudulent clicks emanate from malicious competitors or individuals with political or personal vendettas wishing to harm the site owners revenues from adsense.

Invalid clicks arising from your own accidental clicks or those of your family members or office workers can be prevented very easily. Download this PDF file(zipped) for detailed information.

Malicious and other fraudulent clicks are much more difficult to prevent, but it’s recommended that you arm yourself with tools with which to defend yourself should Google suspend your account.

1. Be on the lookout for fraud - Log into you Google account as frequently as you can(I check mine at least 3 times a day) and try to match your day to day click patterns with your web server access logs. A sudden spike in clicks should warrant a thorough examination of you server log traffic patterns. Report any anomalies to Google promptly and if you can track the offending IP address ban it in your .htaccess file. I have banned a whole range of ip’s before and in one instance a whole country. Either way do what you have to do to protect your account.

2. Be on the lookout for third party web-based solutions. Many organizations in collaboration with the major advertising networks are working on tools which will enable advertisers and publishers to detect and prevent click frauds more vigorously.

The click fraud issue will never be totally resolved in the near future unless the current advertising model (Cost Per Click) is maintained and not overhauled radically. Just like it is in the case of spammers vs users and site owners vs hackers, online advertisers and fraudulent thieves are locked into an endless race to outsmart each other.

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Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Marketing, Web-Dev-Design 

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