My friend was using adsense on his website for a couple of months but when his CTR started to reach 5% Google suspected that the clicks are bogous and hold his account for investigation. What do you think is the reason of this? Is there any safe CTR?
there are plenty of people with a 5% CTR (and higher) that haven't had any problems. I'm guessing there's a bit more to the story
I have had days with CTR > 10% and strangely my logs show someone browsing my site with a "google" referrer the day after Google guy checks out my site and decides that its pretty normal to have a high CTR because 1) a low traffic site can have wildly fluctuating CTRs 2) well-placed ads increase CTR
My guess: The majority of that 5% is from the same IP that checks the Adsense reports online. They are watching your every move...
CTR has nothing to do with page views, it has more to do with content. I have sites that range from 0.2% CTR to 25.7% CTR.
but in the case of friend, he believe that there are certain CTR that is tolerable and if you CTR is too high then the website maybe subject to investigation.
Maybe so, but as long as you aren't clicking your own ads, there is nothing to worry about even if you are investigated.
Only Google knows for certain. And they certainly aren't going to disclose it. Bottom line is don't click your own ads. And if you do (even once), don't complain about being kicked out of the program.
just by IP as far as I know. I guess they also look at how people are arriving at the page. It could be type in traffic or from an SE. I guess if it is from an SE, there is a higher chance of people clicking on the ads. I could be wrong though. Not too sure how they would know what the reffering sites were.
other things to avoid: don't log into your adsense account from a college or some sort of location that would have a large "block" of IPs. if you log into your account from the same IP range that someone happens to click an ad from, that's not going to look too good for you. honestly, I don't think there's some "high CTR" that triggers a warning. however, radical changes may be investigated- if you have a .5% CTR for 3 months, and then a 20% CTR one day- with 90% of those happening within an hour- I'd say that's certainly going to look suspicious. but I'm sure there are plenty of sites with a 20% CTR consistantly.
@ disgust - why did we can't login from those location that you said? Did google will take the IP address as well? I thought they just take IP address that we use when we sign up for the program as our IP address. At least its what they said, when I activate google ads.....
@alang - i think @disgust was trying to say that, if you log into college or school ip address (which may have a single ip address and use proxy to share) that was blocked by google you will jeopardize you account.
there have been a lot of people that thought they were clever by going to another location (or using a proxy) and clicking their own ads, but then they make the mistake of logging into their CP I'm pretty sure google uses this to detect things, among probably dozens of other ways.
I have a page with a sustained CTR of around 20%. I have had my AdSense account for over a year, no problems.