Big Traffic Increase = Adsense Ban?

My website might be mentioned on a radio show and I would think that traffic would hugely increase after that.

Now obviously with a big increase in traffic comes an equal increase in ad clicks, would Google ban my account because they would see it as something dodgy?

 

They know where it's comming from, so don't worry. If you are however overly concerned send them an email and let them know.

 

I would send them an email regardless, there's no harm. This is especially true since it'll be a lot of type-ins (ie. no referrer) which might raise a flag (or it might not).

 

Thanks I'll do that. I read someones blog about how his account got disabled and he said Adsense banned him because his website was mentioned on a radio show. He had to do a lot of stuff to get his account unbanned.

Whats the best way to contact Adsense about this sort of thing?

and also

Do you know of a really quick way to contact Adsense in an emergency?

 

This is good advice. They keep an eye on this stuff and expect your traffic to grow. If it takes a huge jump though and you have communicated to them in advance about the ad then you should have no issue. Good Luck.

 

Best to contact them through your adsense account, so that there is no confusion as to it actually being you and your account. If you have more than one site, be sure to mention which one is getting the press mention.

I think I remember yfs1 mentioning the same happened to him... perhaps it was his blog on getting banned from adsense for increased traffic you read?

 

@NetMidWest: That's a pretty good article.

As mentioned if there's no possibility to check the referer there might be a problem, but as long as someone from Google is able to check where the traffic hit came from you're pretty safe. Worse scenario would be if you wouldn't know you have been mentioned on a radio show.

 

Edited: AFter reading yfs1's article, I now think you should email them!

 

hope i can advertise on radio too....
to have an increase in my traffic...whooo...

 

Very interesting post from yfs1.

My site will be mentioned next month in womans day mag. I've just mailed google to notify them of this, just in case. What a shame to have your site trip an auto-filter just as you have a surge in valid, highly targetted traffic.

On a side note, I'm a totally white-hat, serious web publisher hoping very much to be able to retire some day on my honestly generated earnings. I would not dream of trying something shady. Why risk it?

But it seems the paranoia (some) people have with their accounts is somewhat justified. I'd assumed as long as your site, and actions were ethical you would not have to worry about a forum visitor clicking on 9 distinct ads, or whatever. (I don't even know how to check clicks by ip anyway)

And since I am a serious webmaster, I intend on getting as many mentions in national magazines and surges in traffic as possible.

Does google want to to read all the emails about increased traffic (blaa, blaa, blaa) from all the folks that are seriously worried about every little thing, and will google actually do something about it in advance? Or is it more like ban first, ask questions later?

Do I need to fashion a sturdy tinfoil hat that will last each time I get a nice traffic spike?

So anyway thanks for listening. It's just a bit surprising to me the system is such that we might have to manage our accounts proactively, almost based on fear.

Has all the click-fraud made it that even honest ethical publishers are presumed guilty, until proven innocent?

</end rant>
</removing sturdy tin foil hat>

Corina

 

In your situation, there is a possibility that could happen. A simple email explaining why the surge of traffic is occurring is the easy way to avoid any problems. My blog was mentioned once on a busy 'hollywood gossip' site and the traffic surged accordingly.

Luckily, I was already aware that sudden, seemingly inexplicable, traffic spikes can get flagged so I sent an email to Google explaining why my traffic had exploded overnight and was replied to the following day with a polite 'thank you for letting us know' email.

There were no problems with my Adsense account, however, I'm fairly certain I would have faced the same problems as yfs1 had I not sent the email.

 

You told them after the surge in traffic?

 

I told them as soon as I became aware of it myself.

 

Same thing happened to me and I did the same. I knew I was going to get more traffic but nowhere near as much as I ended up getting, so I sent them a heads up after the fact just letting them know what was going on.

I'm pretty sure that in most cases Google are acute enough to figure out what's what, but it couldn't hurt to have efforts on your part to be responsible documented.

 

Here's the response to my email:

Hello Corina,

Thanks for notifying us of the potential increase in traffic we may notice on your account. In the future, it is not necessary that you notify us of traffic spikes but you may feel free to do so if you would like to.

For your reference, to protect your interests as well as those of our advertisers, Google monitors clicks and impressions on Google ads to prevent any abuse of the AdSense program. Google's proprietary technology analyzes all ad clicks and impressions for any activity intended to artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings.

Clicks or impressions deemed by our monitoring system to be invalid will appear in your reports, but because advertisers are not charged for them, no associated revenue will be shown. Please rest assured that your account is being properly credited for all valid clicks and impressions.

For additional questions, we suggest you visit our AdSense Support site at https://www.google.com/support/adsense . If you're unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please feel free to reply to this email.

 

I'm not sure whether that is good or bad. The fact that someone reported on their Blog that they got banned from Google due to being mentioned on a radio show and not informing Adsense beforehand, would suggest it is necessary to give a heads up.

 

It is true that they can monitor who clicks and can take patterns from there to figure out if it is fishy or not. The problem comes in when the refferers are blocked. This happens usually when it is part of a big email newsletter but a good point was brought up about offline publicity (which accounts for a lot of our traffic also). Google obviously doesn't have any system in place for knowing how someone found out about you when they just enter your domain (without clicking on a link)

Think of it from their standpoint. Suddenly overnight you are getting tons of untrackable traffic. Their first concern is that you are part of an email request to click campaign or something similar. So they tend to suspend the account and then it is up to you to show that in fact there was a reason for that type of traffic.

It may seem unfair but it is there to protect advertisers as I would venture a guess that most times that this type of thing happens it is due to fraud (and those people never defend themselves)

In the original posters situation, most of the visitors will be coming from a link so Google will track this and you will be fine. Thats why I never say you are suspended or banned due to high traffic, but more specifically due to spikes in untraceable traffic.

Regardless, you now have a letter showing you made Google aware and if the worst was to happen, that can be your starting point (along with the already mentioned steps in my article and its follow up article)

It is said so many times that Google doesn't care or that they ban people on purpose to keep the money. All of that is absolute ridiculous as they actually do a human review when requested as long as you give a little respect (which will be returned)

 

Well I hope that is not the case. In my case over the past 2 days I have been doing some very heavy marketing on my site and my adsense earnings shot through the roof, almost in the $xxx range now. I went ahead and installed better tracking software so I have proof and emailed the big G. Shouldn't be a problem as far as I can tell, especially since most of them have referals.

Although I will be doing offline marketing soon as well. I guess bottom line is. If your expecting heavy volume with no referals, play it safe and email G about it.

 

Just for a point of reference, when I recieved the ban my earnings had shot up to nearly $xx,xxx - 95% having a blind refferer.

 

yah, I agree thats a no goodie. But at the same time I think flags would go up since my account was normally hovering in the .xx to x.xx range everyday until i launched this site yesterday and my massive marketing campaign. To me that would be suspicious even with referals. Ahh well such is life, at least I have all my bases covered.