Yep. The official letter from Adsense (well, at least I think it is!) today giving me a warning for invalid clicks. They said they will reduce my earnings but any further clicks like I have been getting and they will ban my account. Now I have been account holder for 2 years and never clicked my own ads except for a mistake once or twice over the two years. However, I noticed some increased activity on one of my sites for clicks just yesterday. Adsense team suggested I use some third party logging software to try and work out where these clicks are coming from. What's the best software for this? I have heard there is adlogger...any more?? However again, has anyone else verified that the email address is the valid address from Google? Col
Hi Col, very sorry for that.. I recommend you contact G immediately. You can report about suspected click activity to G @ https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact providing your logs and comments.. Iam not sure if the email (UK) you are looking for is valid or not. Try ur best... Hope this helps. Regards,
OK...Thanks mate. I just forwarded it on...If it is not valid it is a damn good lookalike I must say. Here's the content: It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on your Google ads, posing a financial risk to our AdWords advertisers. We have found that users of third-party programmes have been paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programmes include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read or pay-to-click sites. Please note that any method that artificially generates click or impressions on Google ads is strictly prohibited by our programme policies, as such activity may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. We understand that you may want more information about the activity we detected. However, because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection systems, we're unable to provide our publishers with any details about their account activity, including any web pages, users or third-party services that may have been involved. Thank you for your understanding. We recommend reviewing these references to learn more about invalid click activity and other activities that could endanger your account standing:https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_GB https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms?hl=en_GB http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426&hl=en_GB If you need help logging the traffic on your site to determine the source of your visitors, we recommend trying these Google search terms: Webmaster resources Website tracking and logging Site traffic analysis In addition, because we credit advertisers for any invalid activity we detect, we may adjust your account earnings for any days during which such activity occurred. Lastly, please note that if we continue to detect invalid activity from these services on your Google ads, we may take further action on your account in order to protect our advertisers' interests, and payment may be withheld. Thank you for your understanding. Yours sincerely, The Google AdSense Team Col
Wow, then it must be real. It looks like google's writing. I always thought they used adsense-support @ and adsense-noreply@
Well, either way is crap. Either someone is pulling a fast one on me or someone is click bombing me.....GRRRRRRR
Someone got an email from this address and it wasnt a warning but an actual ban. I`d say its the real one.
Adlogger is no longer being developed and is not supported anymore either. Clickaider is one I've heard about, but not sure if its free or not. Good luck in your battle.
That's the problem...WHICH SITE?? I have hundreds of sites and they didn't indicate which one was having the invalid clicks. I just checked awstats from one site and there seems to be a number of clicks in the last week that is not normal. But how to identify where they are coming from is the difficulty.
Pull the ads from the high risk site and replace with some ad program while you figure out what to do? I think if you emailed adsense they will pinpoint the exact site for you.
I want to find a click tracking service also, and how do they work? It sucks that someone can actually get a person banned just from clicking there ads 100 times.. Tyler
Agree... but its a good thing he got a warning message. Too many have been "insta-banned" because of these things. Hope they tell you which site and things work out.
Looks like a true Google email. In regards to fraud clicks... i heard people use clickmonkeys or whatever they are called to generate clicks. Unfortunately, there is lots of fraud with google and after speaking with some major companies who had legal issues with google, i got disappointed with them big time. They tell me that search engines are not interested in investigating click frauds, as they make billions of dollars on them annually.... Go figure...
I don't know, i figured you did by what you originally said... Do you have channels set up? If you do you should have an idea what is a normal volume of clicks per day given the amount of impressions, so if it was me i'd pull them from the sites that fit in to the slightly higher than normal range until i got some logging setup. But yes i agree, in situations like this they should indicate the domain in question. After all they have the system in place to detect and nullify these clicks.