How Does Google Detects Invalid Clicks

Author: Casey Yew

A lot of Google AdSense publishers are banned from the Google AdSense program for invalid clicks. Some of these Google AdSense publishers manage to get their AdSense account reinstated. However, majority of them failed to do so. As a result, they are banned from the Google AdSense program.

Google does not reveal any specific details about invalid clicks in order to protect their proprietary clicks fraud detection technology. Hence, you would not know who is generating these clicks on your site or where these clicks come from.

If you are not getting any details of the invalid clicks from the termination letter, it may be a good idea to learn how Google defines these clicks and ways to detect them.

Google defines invalid clicks as:

• Manual clicks intended to increase publisher's advertising
• Clicks by automated tools, robots, or other deceptive software.

So how does Google detect these clicks and how would they know which clicks are invalid?

Google AdSense team uses three powerful tools to detect invalid clicks:

• Detection and Filtering Tool: Each click on an AdSense ad is monitored by Google system. Google will record the IP of each click, the time of the click, duplicate clicks and various click patterns. Google will use these factors and filter out potential invalid clicks.
• Advanced Monitoring Tool: Google uses its proprietary software to monitor clicks fraud activity. They are constantly working to improve their technology.
• The Google Team: In addition, Google has a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual case of clicks fraud. When Google system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team will examines the affected account.

Despite the effort that Google put in to improve their clicks fraud detection technology, there are few innocent publishers whose AdSense account has been suspended or banned temporarily for different reasons. For example, a sudden spike in your AdSense earnings would probably raise the red flag in their system and cause your AdSense account to be suspended. If your AdSense account is suspended for invalid clicks which you did not commit, Google provides you a way to make your appeal:

http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_appeal

A Piece of Advice

When you are making your appeal via email, you should stay calm and plan the right strategy. You should be patient when dealing with Google and most importantly you should be polite when communicating with them. You may take initiative to provide them with all the documents they need.

Tips for Improving AdSense Performance

Source: ArticleStreet.com

Tear Down the Borders

• Remove borders on your AdSense ads.
• Web visitors eyes wander around the screen; borders stop them from wandering.
• Removing borders from your AdSense ads can lead to a significant boost in CTR.

Use Matching Fonts

• Match the font of your site content to the fonts of your AdSense ads.

Use Matching Colors

• Match the colors of your AdSense ads to the colors of your site content.
• Make the ads look like content and more visitors will look at them.
• One exception to the color matching rule is sites that are designed to appeal to scammers and spammers.
• Those sites sometimes perform better with highly contrasting colors.

Use Blue Links

• Another exception to the color matching rule is to set the links in your AdSense ads to blue.
• Blue links tend to have a higher CTR than other link colors, because people have become used to clicking blue links.

Use Large Ads

• Larger ads outperform smaller ads.
• Wider ads also outperform more narrow ads.
• The Large Rectangle (336x280) is the best performing ad unit.

Use Lots of Ads

• Google allows you to use three ad units and one link unit on each page.
• Use them all. The more ads you have, the higher your Page CTR will be.

Place Ads Above the Fold

• "The fold" is industry jargon for "the part of the page that the user sees without scrolling down".
• This will vary depending upon the resolution of the users screen and the size of their browser window.
• Place as many ads as possible above the fold.
• Ads placed below the fold are seldom seen and seldom clicked.

Place Ads on the Left

• Web users are accustomed to seeing menus on the left side of the web page.
• Move your menu to the right and place your AdSense ads on the left.

Use the Heat Map

• Use the Google AdSense Heat Map to determine where to place ads.
• The darker spots are areas where users spend more time looking.
• Place your ads in the darker areas.

Integrate Ads with Content

• Visitors will be reading your content.
• Keeps your ads as close to your content as possible to ensure that the visitors also look at your ads.

Use Custom Channels

• Use AdSense's Custom Channels to test the performance of different ad sizes, placements, colors and fonts.

Don't use Low-Paying Competing Ads

• Don't clutter your page with competing ads that don't pay.
• If a user clicks on an ad that pays you $.01, they are not clicking on an ad that pays you $.30.

Use URL Channels

• Use AdSense URL Channels to determine which pages are making you the highest CTR, CPM, and earnings.
• Focus your efforts on building pages like those.

Use an AdSense Reporting Package

• Google only supports 200 channels.
• If you have more than 200 pages, use AdSense reporting software to give you more insight into your AdSense earnings.

Don't Compete for Other Peoples High Paying Keywords

• If a keyword is on a list of high-paying keywords, that means that thousands of spammers are already competing for that keyword.
• Don't be a follower.
• There is no money in being one of the crowd.

Do Compete for Your Own High Paying Keywords

• Monitor your AdSense URL channels to determine which keywords are making you the most money.
• Compete for those keywords.
• Build more pages optimized for similar keywords.
• Get inbound links for those keywords.
• Spend your time and efforrt on the keywords which are making you money.

Increase Traffic

• In the long run, the best way to increase your AdSense revenue is to increase traffic to your web site.

15 Great Google AdSense tips to earn money

Summary for: http://adsense-exposure.blogspot.com/2006/10/15-great-google-adsense-tips-to-earn.html

Google AdSense Tip #1: Find your keywords
Before serving ads on a web page, check its keyword density. A free and advanced tool for finding the most prominent keywords in a page can be found here: SEO Density Analyzer.

Google AdSense Tip #2: Improve your keywords
Get keyword suggestions from Overture Search Inventory and from Google AdWords Sandbox. Get new keywords that can help you improve your ad relevance.

Google AdSense Tip #3: Keep your website focused on a theme
Use the keyword suggestions to enhance your web pages and to build theme-based content. And also try to get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. Don't forget that Google Google AdSense is keyword-targeted advertising.

Google AdSense Tip #4: Write a new page every day
One of the best tips is to add a new page to your web site every day. The more content you have, the more visitors you will get. Put an Google AdSense unit on each and every content page of your site.

Google AdSense Tip #5: Choose the right Google AdSense format
Wider formats are successful because the ads are compact, easy to read and are complementary to the content. The top three Google AdSense formats are:

• 336x280 large rectangle
• 300x250 medium rectangle
• 160x600 wide skyscraper

Google AdSense Tip #6: Color tips
When creating your Google Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.

Google AdSense Tip #7: Position tips
Visitors tend to look at the big headlines to see if your page is worth reading. If you get them interested, they will read the text and look for your navigation links. Place the Google AdSense ads in a prominent place around the top/left part of your page or under your headlines, where your visitors are most likely to look at. If you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is a good place for Google AdSense ads because your visitors read the text and then they want more resources.

Google AdSense Tip #8: Increase the number of ads
If you have a lot of text on a page, use multiple Google AdSense units. You can use up to three Google AdSense units on a page, two Google AdSense search boxes and one unit of ad links. Link units allow the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear on the search results.

Google AdSense Tip #9: Preview Google ads
You can find out what ads will be served by Google Google AdSense if you install Google Google AdSense Preview Tool, a very simple tool available only for Internet Explorer 6.0. Click to advertiser sites without generating invalid clicks, and easily add their URLs to your URL filter list. Because Google AdSense uses geo-targeting, Google serves different ads for other countries. Instead of faking your IP or travelling abroad to test your ads, use this Google AdSense tool to see what ads see your visitors from France, Germany or other countries.

Google AdSense Tip #10: What not to do

• Don't click your own ads
• Don't ask others to click on your Google ads
• Don't manually change Google AdSense code
• Don't place Google ads on sites that include prohibited content (e.g.: adult sites)
• Don't employ cloaking, hidden text or farm links
• Don't use Google AdSense ads on the same page with similar ads (e.g.: Yahoo Publisher Network)

Google AdSense Tip #11: Show images above or next to your ads
Placing images above Google AdSense ads is not necessarily prohibited by program policies. However, depending on the method of implementation this could be considered encouraging users to click on ads. So you should include a border line between the ads and the images. Don't show specific products in your images, in order not to mislead the visitors. Just use generic images that will increase the visibility of your ads.

Google AdSense Tip #12: Use section targeting
Use section targeting to emphasize some content in your page. On your site, place this code where you want to emphasize. Content you want to emphasize. If you want some content to be ignored, use

Google AdSense Tip #13: Alternate the colors of your ads
Google AdSense allows you to have up to 4 color variations for each variable for which you can specify color. You should do that if you put Google AdSense ads on pages that receive many impressions from the same visitors (for example forums) to reduce ad blindness.

Google AdSense Tip #14: Your Google ads should be visible
Make sure your text ads are visible to the surfers in all screen formats. If you put the ads in a table give sufficient breathing room, i.e. proper cell padding and cell spacing to make the ads stand out from the rest of your content.

Google AdSense Tip #15: Use Google AdSense channels
You can categorize the content of your website into channels and then track your performance. This way you can experiment with different types of ads and see which is performing the best. Instead of buying an Google AdSense tracker, you can enter the most important pages in your site and see how they are doing. Create up to 200 channels for Google AdSense.