A lot of Cynical folks in here! Hey: accidental clicks do happen! Happened to me a few times but I haven't been banned (yet.) Here's my advice: 1) Contact g00gle as soons as the accident occurs and let them know. Report each and every accidental click. 2) If you haven't already done so, signup for an A-d-Word_s account; when you signup, use the same email address that you use for your Ad-Sen_se account AmCy
That is good advice, we are just making fun of some of these wild claims on cats and dragonflies making clicks or my friend was sleeping on my mouse and clicked on my ads a 100 times as he was rolling over on the couch
Who are you using now Josh Are you putting any www.cj.com affiliate banners on your sites What other text ad networks are you looking at now
I am sure there are a large number of people that click one or two of their own ads in the first day they join. Probably because they only read the TOS properly once they are up and running. From the posts above it appears that google waits a long time before taking action. This seems a bit radical. Or maybe the guys that are protesting are bending the truth a bit
My point exactly. I beleive there is some acceptable level of forgivness as far as Google is concerned. Nobody is perfect. If you click your own ads in error on occasion that's one thing. If you repeatedy click your own ads that's entirely different and will leave Google with no choice but to excuse yyou from the program...what else can they do??? I think most disgruntled AS banned members that post on this forum are not being truth, ie. '4 clicks and I got banned' or 'How could this happen'. Only you know why. In my experience 4 accident clicks, over time, doesn't get you banned.
Further to that, I agree with other members that suggest you should contact Google when this happens...it will never hurt the final outcome to report your own honest errors.
I'm new here and just started using Adsense a couple of weeks ago. I have to admit, when you first put it up on your site, it is really tempting at first to click on an ad just to see what happens. I haven't yet, but I don't feel so tempted anymore... Patty
See, you have already learned the most valuable AS tip from DP. FYI, I bought a Adsense tip book for $80, opened it and it said 'Don't click your own banners'...end of story
Clicking on the ads on your own sites can happen by accident. Especially if you are working on your sites all the time. We should be able to give google a few IPs where clicks from those IPs won't count. I have accidentally clicked on my own ads, but I know that Google didn't count those clicks. Sometimes, I get really worried that Google would take me out of their program. I do have a lot of pages indexed in the search engines and my sites are ranking well. I give them a lot of legitimate traffic, 2,000 - 3,000 clicks a day. I also have a tracker software installed so that I know who is clicking on my sites and on what ads. I noticed sometimes that the same IP would click more than 7 or 8 clicks on different Adsense ads on the same page. So far, Google has been okay with it. But I wonder what the threshold is. I wonder if I should put some codes to display ads from a different Ad Network if someone with same IP clicks a few times already. But since we know nothing about what they are thinking, not sure what to do. Once, I had an IP click 12 times on the same page, on 12 different ads that were displayed from Adsense. I agree with Homer that AdSense is the best program out there. But it's very scary.
Yes, I have seen this a lot: lots of AS clicks on the same page from the same IP. But I have noticed that AS' answer to this is to simply decrease the value of each click so that sponsors get a dsicount rate for these repeat clicks. The first click is worth the most, then the cost diminishes significantly as more clicks are made from the same person. I'm not complaining. I'm a both a AW users and a AS user so to me this solution makes sense. As long as you aren't conspiring with others to generate fraudulent clicks, this sort of thing certainly won't get you banned. If you think about it, they aren't going to punish a publisher just because someone likes the ads they see and are cliking away. As always, IMO. AmCy
Exactly, they discount those clicks and in many cases will not bill anything if they are fraud clicks. But you as a publisher can still get punished if you go down to your friends house a few miles away and start clicking on your own ads every other day
Click fraud is the inverse of gambling. When you gamble you risk a little to win a lot. With click fraud you steal a little and risk a lot. What they have in common is that the odds are against you so you will probably loose.
No doubt. I think AS click fraud will increase significantly when Yahoo! eventually rolls out their version of the program. I think there are a lot of young folks out there with regular 9-5 jobs who don't take the AS program very seriously. I think some will start taking more click fraud risks becuase they figure that they can just go to Yahoo! (or MSN, whenever that rolls out) if they get banned. AmCy
Indeed! I have _never_ purposely clicked any of my ads or even friend's ads, but I have on a few occasions been developing a page and get moving faster than the browser can keep up, and inadvertently click an ad. I cringe each time it happens. First time I emailed G immediately and told them it was a mistake. Got the canned response others have mentioned (admonishment, and ad viewer tool link) and didn't bother repeating the email next time(s) it happened. As all the smart people repeat, just say "NO" to clicking your own ads. The little bit of change it would generate isn't worth being tossed.
Yup. I know that story. Now it's even trickier for me since my AS ads are displaying even when I am doing a browser preview on my local network. AmCy
Someone should begin a thread entitled 'Here's today's click fraudsters...Google, go get em' We can keep posting to the same thread. Just to keep it in one tidy place
Agree! There should be a sticky and listing of such people. That should also have most creative excuse section.