I have to be pretty careful with what ads show up on one of my sites, as certain advertisers can jeopordize other affiliations I have. As we all know the link unit ads do not show up in the preview tool. So if I see a topic that is suspect, I will click on it, bring up the ad page and then pull off urls and investigate sites without clicking on the ads. Very recently I contacted Google to make sure that this was okay, they indeed confirmed that it was okay, the only drawback is it can skew impression numbers. Well this morning, I am pretty confident that I did this twice and it counted them as clicks with no revenue both times. This particular site is new and has minimal traffic, and from my logs didn't have any other traffic at the time. Anyways, has anyone else seen clicks attributed to hitting a link topic? It has never happened when I have done it in the past.
He's talking about the google link unit ads. You don't get paid for clicking the ad link unit, only if a person clicks one of the actual ads that show after the first click. He wants to know if clicking a link unit counts as a click even though you don't get paid (clicking the link unit is ok with google). I don't run them, so I can't say.
No... I've certainly opened up numerous adlinks in my own account (but of course didn't click on any ads) - and they don't count as clicks... it's a great way to see how many advertisers are paying for each keyword...
I didn't click yet on my link unit, but of the other account just like the link unit of this forum, yes I did. But I don't know if it's okay with the Adsense policies.