Hello I have a website that gets near half a million pageview per day (game niche) and how can I track adsense click bombing attacks ? for an example, CTR can be changed in 0.01% - 0.50%, and let's say I get about 10,000 - 12,000 clicks a day and some one attacks with 200 invalid clicks. it is more than enough to get an account banned. my point is I can't possibly notice the invalid 200 clicks. so how can I know if there is an attack ? with huge numbers of log files, it's not easy to track individual visitors. and most of all how sites like DP, Digg and ezinearticles survive ? do they also report about unusual activities ?
Why do you say 200 invalid clicks on 10,000 - 12,000 a day "is more than enough to get an account banned" ? From where do you take this information? Invalid clicks for one reason or another are discounted daily from all publisher accounts transparently. Adsense is in business for 9 years already, they know about invalid clicks and that they can come from click bombing.. I wouldn't worry about it. Especially with a large publisher account, you're pretty safe
Don't even worry about it. Google will just automatically deduct the earnings from the click bombing. The only time you need to worry is when over 10% of your clicks are bombing everyday.
when you invest huge amount of money and only income source is your websites, sometimes it is harder to get sleep thinking some lunatic can screw up your whole life in one night. and reading other users threads it doesn't seem that Google is very understandable in this case.
yeah sometimes google can be harsh about stuff like this. but adsense has been around for years, they know how to deal with invalid clicks and click bombing. i've been click bombed before, massively. nothing came of it. if you're really dishing out that kind of traffic, i doubt google will terminate your adsense account.
Some people are very jealous of the success of others they are not able to see it and they just try to screw up the things. Just be ready with an alternative or try contacting google adsense for a solution as far as i see you will not have to worry because google knows where these clicks are coming from and they may catch hold of these people. I wish for your success in online business.
I understand how you feel because for the first year with adsense I used to have that same problem. You can't really do anything to stop those little worm-like jerks who click bomb. This is something I've learned from the beginning of making barely anything a month to more than enough. You skipped that process but if you didn't you would not worry about it. Realistically, you should have a backup plan anyway, just in case adsense does vote you off of the island.
I did try some other ad networks, like cpmstar, chitika and whatever people say that work for game niche... but that wasn't even enough to pay for the servers. that's why I am this worried. if I am banned from Google adsense only option is selling my websites and finding a job. and I hate working 8 hours a day.
For starters... try to be nice to anyone and everyone offline and on... b/c ya just never know. If it does happen, hopefully it is just one person who is not smart enough, and only does it from there own ISP. And hopefully Google will understand, and also give you the IP(s) in question so you can add them to a deny list in a .htaccess file or something. Pretty much every month I have at least $1-$100 taken off. I never question Google about it... I just assume they are invalid clicks of some sort. And that has been going on for about a year now. EDIT: I would also never never put my site(s) in my sig. I also never give out my site address(es) to anyone... family, friends, or otherwise.
how much do you make per month if you don't mind me asking? Cool game site, must of worked hard on it.
Since you are so worried you should probably use the channels in adsense per ad, to be able to get a click total and try to sell a few banners independently. This way you can mix the earns. If you lose one, at least its not a total loss. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it and just make sure your next site is an affiliate to secure yourself at least 1/2 way.
Just for your backup plan, you can try in BuySellAds. They are very good in terms of payment! And I do not have any idea about what will Google do, but I have seen my client's adsense account got banned with unpaid $1500, which was cancelled later! I don't know the reason of ban though! Best of luck for your site, and it's pretty good one. One thing I strongly agree with you is, I also don't like working 8 hours a day. Specially following orders by some other person. So I do freelancing, and run a website, which gives me enough till date.
"Invalid clicks" is the most difficult part to track. But use something like statcounter and you can check the click bombing IP addresses roughly. Again, it not give you accurate stats.
At 12K clicks per day, you probably make around $1K per day, that's not bad for an arcade game site. If you're that concerned about being banned then diversity your revenue. Sell some advertisement and reduce your dependency on Adsense. With that much traffic, with selling advertisements you would actually be able to increase your daily revenue. So it's a win-win for you.
You have a pretty established site, I agree with everyone, don't worry about it, Google usually deducts from your income any invalid clicks after their estimates. The only time when you should worry about it is when you have crazy CTR ratios like over 10% happening everyday. Cheers!
Seriously, I wouldn't even worry about it if I were you. Don't lose sleep over a click bomb attack that may or may not happen that you have no control over. Google isn't just going to ban your account out of nowhere. Trust me, most of the people whose accounts get banned, deserved to be banned (ESPECIALLY on this forum). People just look for excuses as to why they were banned instead of taking responsibility. Most of the time it's a case of "Oh, I was banned because some random person click bombed me". No, dumbass, you were banned because you were clicking your own ads.