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.
 
Interestingly we are also seeing deductions of 40% at the end of the month and this has only started happening in the last few months. Before that it was never more than 5 or 6%.

We are also using the ad after first post position and Ad Manager 2.

Down to a 28% deduction this month. So an improvement, but still awful.

No changes made at our end.
 
One thing I have noticed is that for the last few months Adsense had been sending us a lot of "Ads" which were just a random string of letters such as "hsdjhsjksdffdu" and invariably linked to websites which didn't exist, or in some case linked to Lorum ipsum wordpress pages.

Obviously we shouldn't ever have had these, but they seem to have died down a lot now, so maybe Google have finally got a hold on them?
 
I have been having the exact same issue on our forums since March and cannot get to the bottom of it. Previously my “Invalid traffic” deductions were less than 1% typically, since March it has been well over 80%.

July was particularly bad, with over £2,700 estimated traffic, when it came to getting paid in August we barely received £450.

I have raised support tickets on Google etc and all I get is generic replies and links to their help pages about bots and tricking people into clicking on adverts, none of which is applicable.

I have had Adsense adverts in the same place for well over 12 years, one at the top (except on the homepage and the standard xF exceptions such as the registration page), and one at the bottom.

I too am wondering if there is something on xF that is causing this. I have even offered to pay someone to come up with a solution, but even when someone wants to help me I’m getting nowhere! Fortunately I haven’t spent, as most people say it isn’t something they can help with.
 
Check the numbers of Adsense Ads Clicks for the last month in Google Adsense and in Google Analytics. In Analytics you'll see the real number of clicks, In AdSense - the number of clicks that Google accepted as valid. Accordingly to your words, the difference might be about 80%.
 
Check the numbers of Adsense Ads Clicks for the last month in Google Adsense and in Google Analytics. In Analytics you'll see the real number of clicks, In AdSense - the number of clicks that Google accepted as valid. Accordingly to your words, the difference might be about 80%.


Less than 5% between the two in our case - surely that doesn't equate to a 40% revenue chop?
 
Similar again, around 30%

We were back to more normal last month <5% deductions which is how it should be.

No change to our site and no significant changes to stats, but I was aggressively deleting fake ads via the Adsense Blocking Controls (ie. ads which point to non-existent domains/new blog domains and generally had gibberish text in them (See attached for example)
 

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and this month virtually no deduction at all (y)

We have made some changes to ads this month though, as we are now checking for TCF 2.0 approval before firing the google tags.
 
Hi, Would you be able to advise how you go about this process please?

In our case, we use Quantcast Choice to get the permissions, and we are using Google Ad Manager (aka DFP) to serve the adverts.

Its then a case of delaying the firing of the tags in the Javascript (googletag.pubads().disableInitialLoad(); )

and using an eventlistener for tcData to wait for the user to consent (or checking they have already consented) before releasing the tags (googletag.pubads().refresh)


Quite a bit of coding and messing around really, and it all depends which tools you are using to get consent and display your ads.

There is nothing specifically built into Xenforo to help you.
 
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})
 
We also blocked this whole IP range which belongs to "UK Dedicated Servers Limited":

you need to search your server log file for requests from chrome 66.0.3359*
Can anyone advise how to find individual IPs? I'm having a significant number of cities and User agents with CTRs above 100%. Blocking user agent is quite easy, IP less so.

My host advised that they dont log at request level because it would be too much data to store.
 
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