My idiot colleagues keep clicking on our ads. Any ideas?

Hi,

I've had adsense up for a couple of weeks, and despite my clear warnings to my colleagues, they're tell me they're clicking on our ads. The ads are really good; highly relevant, and my workmates tell me they're genuinely interested in/curious about them.

I administer the account from the same IP, and I'm worried I'm going to be banned.

Should I come clean to Google and ask them to refund the clicks and ban the IP? Can they do that in any case?

All the account details are in my name and I'm worried!

Cheers,
Paz.

 

.htacces ... deny all ip !

 

send google in ASAP if they are using the same IP address

 

Deduct the costs from their pay.

 

I found out Roman had a nice solution for this dilemma.

Hope this helps

If there are a lot of clicks generated by your co-workers i would contact G as soon as possible and to notify them of the measures you have taken already to prevent this in the future.

 

man just deny those ips in .htaccess !!! deny the whole host god damn students and you dont have to worry about anything

 

Solution:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=710469&postcount=11

 

Thanks for all the replies.

The hosts edit works great (I'm using windows hosting, but I'm sure I could eventually work something similar to the php in asp, but I needed a fast option).

I didn't need to restart the computer (Win XP prof). It looks awful in firefox, but in IE it skips the ads completely.

Sorry for the puny rep.... must be a bit like getting kissed by a gnat...

Cheers,
Paz.

 

Nice to see it worked out for you

 

Check logs and catch their ip and block them and report to Adsense team.
Or hide ads for those ip addresses.

 

hmm... if your colleagues are genuinely interested in the ads, shoudn't you get paid for the referral? i'm sure google's smart enough to take that into consideration.

how many clicks are you talking about?

 

Hi,

thanks again for the support.

There weren't many clicks that they admitted to. I can't be sure how many but I suspect less than double figures over the two weeks, but it's a significant percentage of our clicks nonetheless!

The problem was that they're not particularly IT savvy; they'd never heard of adsense, and they don't know what an IP address is, so they just didn't believe me when I said that Google could somehow detect clicks from our office.

After the hosts edit I can sleep a bit safer....

Cheers,
Paz.

 

The host edit works only on the computer you made the change on, I believe.
You better do the same on their computers as well or get an asp code to hide the ads for your office IP.
.htaccess will not work for you on a windows hosting

 

They "admitted" to, that's the key phrase. They could have clicked more, but realizing that it was wrong, didn't want to admit to all of it.

You still need to contact Google. You're starting off with them on a bad footing. They probably know someone from your IP is clicking on the ads (not probably, they do know), and are waiting for you to fess up. When you don't, they might take it as a sign that you are untrustworthy and a cheat, and ban you at the end of the month that you make over $100. Google is notorious for saving up the ban until the end of the month that they have to pay you.

I would email them now, explain the situation, how you have remedied it, and beg their forgiveness. The Google Gods are easily angered.