AdSense shaved 80%

Anatoliy

Well-known member
The "Estimated earnings" for June lost 80% after being moved to "Balance" and it drives me mad. All that I can get from them is an reply "It's probably related for invalid traffic". Last month I blocked countries with cloudflare. Didn't help.

Do you experience the same issue? May be someone found the reason and would share the knowledge?

Is it possible that it's the xenforo software that violating adsense's turms of use? I had another forum (IPB) and there was a warning about ajax pagination in the admin -> config area, something like "You have to turn it of if you serve Google Adsense ads". Does xenForo has some similar switch that has to be turned off?

Thanks in advance.
 
Using CloudFlare to ban some specific user agents and IP addresses and our invalid traffic this month is down to under 5%.

It looks like we were definitely getting "click-bombed", originally from server in Newcastle but then they tried various other servers around the world, all using the same user agent though. Even a month after we implemented it, the firewall rules are still blocking hundress of attempts every day but it's no longer affecting our Adsense income.

if it helps anyone, these are the two user agents that Google Analytics identified as having massive CTRs:

Code:
(http.user_agent contains "66.0.3359.139") or (http.user_agent contains "66.0.3359.117")

We also blocked this whole IP range which belongs to "UK Dedicated Servers Limited":
Code:
(ip.src in {37.9.61.0/24})
Exactly the same as my huge click bombs recently. Thanks so much for your help in this thread.
 
I dropped adsense for this very reason. I'm making the same, if not more through another network and not seeing huge discrepancies at the end of each month like with Google.
 
I dropped adsense for this very reason. I'm making the same, if not more through another network and not seeing huge discrepancies at the end of each month like with Google.
Could you recommend any particular suppliers? Feel free to send me a PM ifneedbe.

I switched to Media.Net and have only been receiving around £40 per month. Even with Adsense removing 80%+ of my traffic I'm still getting about 3-4 times as much as this.
 
Similar issue here. I'm getting 15 days of invalid clicks ad serving by adsense, then they enable ads again for around a week to then block me for another 15 days for invalid clicks.

It's been nearly one year this is going on and I'm seriously considering moving away from adsense for this reason.

If anyone knows a good alternative and would like to drop me a pm with the name of it, I'll be happy to leave adsense.

In the meantime, I'll play with cloudflare and configserver, because yeah, we admins have all this time to waste, when Google adsense which is easily capable of doing these checks doesn't care at all, right ? 😒
 
Thanks to all your help.

I used some of the settings in Cloudflare to block the IP range and also the suspicious User Agent which analytics said was responsible for exceedingly high CTR as advised above. January was the first full month this came into effect.

My money taken off for "Invalid traffic" has dropped from 81% in December to 3% in January.

However my actual takings for the month are down on December as the initial earnings are only at around 10%

For several years now (even before the problem first occurred in March last year) I have been averaging 5,000-6,000 clicks per month. In January is less than 1,000. All other attributes (impressions, pageviews, etc) remain largely the same.

Does this imply that these bots have been improperly clicking on my adverts for years? Or have I perhaps done something else wrong?
 
Using CloudFlare to ban some specific user agents and IP addresses and our invalid traffic this month is down to under 5%.

It looks like we were definitely getting "click-bombed", originally from server in Newcastle but then they tried various other servers around the world, all using the same user agent though. Even a month after we implemented it, the firewall rules are still blocking hundress of attempts every day but it's no longer affecting our Adsense income.

if it helps anyone, these are the two user agents that Google Analytics identified as having massive CTRs:

Code:
(http.user_agent contains "66.0.3359.139") or (http.user_agent contains "66.0.3359.117")

We also blocked this whole IP range which belongs to "UK Dedicated Servers Limited":
Code:
(ip.src in {37.9.61.0/24})

Same this month, only 3% invalid clicks.

Think the above with cloudflare has resolved this for us.
 
I kept getting invalid traffic and <1% shown ads. I decided to go back to my old advertiser (tribalfusion) for US, UK and CA and using Adsense for everything else. This works. No more invalid traffic. Next step is to try and see if I can get UK and CA traffic back, if that works, I know the invalid traffic is from the US. I can narrow it down even further that way.

I did this blindly. It sounds like you guys know where the bad traffic is coming from. What tools do you use for that?
 
I think they used Analytics in order to determine which country was hitting ads too often and then blocked the country, but I might be wrong. PS: Is tribalfusion still alive?
 
That's cool. I never much understood Google Analytics. The names for all the things in the sidebar are crazy talk for me.

They are for me. I log in daily here to check my ads:

I have a fill rate of 8-15% (bad) and make $2-3 per day from english speaking countries.
 
I think they used Analytics in order to determine which country was hitting ads too often and then blocked the country, but I might be wrong. PS: Is tribalfusion still alive?

I explained in detail above. Analytics identified a couple of browser user agents that were causing all our invalid traffic.
 
My invalid clicks are down significantly, but my clicks, impressions and estimated earnings are also down substantially.
I'm really struggling to get to the bottom of this, because from my xenForo statistics, my visitor numbers are fairly stable.
 
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