Questions about invalid activity
I'm worried my account is getting invalid traffic. What can I do?
To find out if there's anything suspicious about your account's traffic, we encourage you to review your site's traffic logs regularly and identify any anomalies.
We'd recommend taking a close look at all AdSense referral sites found in your web analytics reports and/or your site's web log history. You should investigate any unusual increase in a particular traffic source from another country, website, or IP address.
If you find a traffic source that seems suspicious, you can block that IP address or referral URL. We also highly recommend monitoring any website optimizers you may be working with.
Segmenting your traffic sources can also help you identify sources of problematic traffic and make appropriate changes to keep your account in good order.
If you notice any suspicious activity or believe your account is being
sabotaged, notify, the Ad Traffic Quality Team right away through our
invalid clicks contact form.
How do I find out which traffic source is generating invalid activity in my account?
To identify the source of invalid traffic, we recommend splitting your traffic into channels, as discussed in Understanding traffic on your site. This will help you see which traffic campaigns are performing well, the user behavior on your site, the demographics of your user base, and so on. You can also use tools like
Google Analytics to investigate specific sources of the traffic to your site.
Unfortunately, in order to protect the effectiveness of our detection systems, we can't share information about specific traffic sources that are known to send invalid traffic.
Can you provide more information about the invalid activity you detected on my account?
We know you may be concerned by any actions taken by our Ad Traffic Quality team on your account, but please be assured that these actions only happen following a careful and detailed investigation.
Due to the policies we've implemented to protect the privacy of our users, and the proprietary nature of our algorithms, we cannot disclose certain details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we find in the accounts, such as the source and timing of invalid clicks. For the security of our advertisers, we also want to be sure that these details can't be used by someone wishing to evade detection in the future.
Please also note that we reserve the right to take action on what we consider to be invalid activity, and may disable accounts for any reason, including invalid activity from any source, in order to protect our advertisers.
What are some examples of invalid activity?
Invalid activity can take many forms, including bot traffic, click farms, incentivized clicks, and accidental clicks.
One of the more malicious forms of invalid activity is bot traffic. Bot traffic generally comes from computers that have been infected by malware or otherwise remotely controlled by a third party. The malware or hijacker can install software on the hijacked computer, which can then be used to perform any number of illicit tasks, one of which may be to load ads and click on them.
Another type of malicious invalid activity comes from click farms, which are large groups of people paid to view and click on ads.
Some traffic providers may appear to provide legitimate site visitors but may actually be delivering invalid traffic, such as bot traffic or clicks from a click farm. For this reason, we strongly urge you to use caution when partnering with third-party traffic services. The
traffic provider checklist can help guide your discussions with any potential traffic provider.
Incentivized clicks are when users aren't actually interested in viewing the ad content or landing page, but are motivated to click on ads for other reasons. A simple example of this is when a publisher encourages users to click on its ads by saying "Help keep my site free by clicking my ads!"" or offers some sort of reward for users who click ads.
Accidental clicks are, as the name implies, clicks where users didn't intend to click on the ad. They often occur as a result of poor ad placement. Please review our
Ad placement policies to learn more. For example, ads should not be clearly distinguished from other website content, such as menu, navigation, and download links.
Will I be punished for things like web crawlers that visit my page?
No, standard web crawlers are a normal part of Internet traffic. Our signals and filters can tell the difference between simple web crawlers and malicious botnets, so we won't penalize you if we detect one. However, since we don't charge advertisers for these non-human impressions and clicks, you also won't generate revenue from this traffic.
