Hi there, I have adsense on my website which generates a steady flow of revenue for about 3 months now. I've read the TOS and I've always played it fair: I never click my own adds, I never encourage people to do so and even ask from my friends not to click my adds unless they are sincerely interested in the add itself, I don't try to trick people in any way to click adds. I always knew that things like that would turn against me: Even if the account would not get banned, advertisers probably wouldn't want their adds on my site anymore. My site is offering my own created software and some articles I wrote myself. But lately, something strange is happening. I'm seeing my adsense revenue almost doubling overnight. I did make a change at same time to my site which seemed to have increased my CTR and my number of hits *have* increased substantially the last few weeks, but the strange thing is, I'm now seeing more total page impressions in the reports than the channel which covers my whole site! It seems as if there are adds from my adsense account running on somebody else's site, or maybe I'm understanding something wrong in the reports? At first I thought: great, the change in my site layout works fantastic! But now I'm beginning to worry that maybe someone is trying to set me up by generating invalid clicks and automated impressions or something, although I wouldn't know why (the nice guy that I am ) The CTR and ECPM is not really extreme or anything, but in the 'quite good' league I suppose. I'm hesitating a bit to contact Google about this, in fear that they might ban me immediately (I believe this happened to people before) and thus loosing my current adsense balance. Any thoughts? Thanks!
I believe I am doing nothing wrong, but what if someone is trying to do *me* wrong by generating invalid clicks/impressions, is this possible? The fact that I'm seeing more total page impressions than what the channel covering my whole url indicates makes me go 'hmmm'...
Don't worry! The channel probably updated slower. If you're honest, which I think you are , then there shouldn't be any problem. It happens to me all the time, so there's nothing you should worry about. Don't hesitate to contact Google, because they can test it out for you to see where those clicks from. (IP) If it is fraud, then they will block it for you. If it isn't ... then GREAT and congratulations on making a great progress
make a new channel. and replace your ads with the new one. see if you keep getting impressions for the old one. any further problems, ask google.
Probably your website traffic has just increased. Checking your logs and comparing it with the past ones could help.
Just did some checking. Actually since the page views reported by adsense increased dramatically (about 30% more), the actual hits reported by the server dropped a little bit (less than 5%). However, it seems that this anomaly in the adsense reports didn't affect the absolute number of hits which also dropped a little bit (together with the number of hits, about 5%). So it seems there's only a strange number of page views reported by adsense...
Just wait for the updating by google..i think its a prob. on their side not urs... it shud be fine wid ya..
I suggest u email Google Adsense Team about this. Tell them that you notice some increasing on clicks on your adsense ads.. Tell them that u suspect there is generating invalid clicks/impressions took place at your site. Ask them to investigate it for u.. If they cant detect any fraud attempt and declare the click as valid.. then good for u if they managed to detect invalid click, then you are in at the safe side since u already asked them to investigate.
If you find anything weired (like some day many clicks or doubling/tripling overnight etc) with your numbers in adsense, its always better to tell google that you are seeing something weired.
Okay, I just mailed them about it and now I'm just praying they won't ban me for it. I think I should be okay because no clicks seem to be coming from the unexplained pageviews, but you never know...
Sure, I'll post here what happens. I'm actually a bit worried after reading so many people got banned after informing google about things like this... Well, I didn't get an answer from Google yet, but in the meantime I took the new Adsense affiliate links off my site and everything seems to be back to normal. Seems like a problem in the Adsense reports. In the meantime, I got a reply from Google. They mentioned that there can be differences in the channel covering the whole domain and the totals because the channel doesn't count hits coming from the domain name without www. I replied back to them with my findings regarding the new affiliate links (which was actually mentioned by another member here). Anyway, I didn't get banned so I'm off to celebrate Thanks for the heads-up everybody!