“Google AdSense is a way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money. It’s also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.” As a web site publisher, you can display content relevant advertisements on your site and be paid whenever they are clicked.

In an effort to “ensure the effectiveness of Google ads for publishers as well as advertisers” Google has created a secret method of checking for “invalid clicks.” As many web site publishers know, this can be a good and bad thing.

For a short period of time, I had Google AdSense on my Blog (http://www.johnmag4u.com/blog/). Within two weeks, Google suspended my account for “invalid clicks and/or impressions.” What Google doesn’t understand is that, like other web publishers, there was no “invalid clicks and/or impressions.” It took me a while to figure out what was happening, but after much research here are my findings.

To begin, what is “invalid clicks and/or impressions.” Google defines them as:

clicks and/or impressions generated by:
- a publisher on his own web pages
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking programs or any other deceptive software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

Google has every right to suspend a person’s account which would perform any of the above listed items. To falsely click on advertisements is extremely immoral. The problem is sometimes it may look like one of those things listed above is happening even though it isn’t.

Google uses IP addresses for most of its AdSense security, among other methods which I will not get into in this article. An IP address is a uniquely assigned number per Internet account. That means when you sign up for an Internet account, you are given one of these numbers. Normally you don’t know your IP address and it is a dynamic IP address that changes every couple of days. If Google sees that the same IP address that clicked on an advertisement also logged into an AdSense account, they consider this a violation.

What they are trying to prevent is the owner of an account from clicking on an advertisement to make money. This also makes sense, but here is where the problem comes in.

People, such as myself, can be in an environment where they share IP addresses with people they don’t even know. For example, I am a student at Penn State University and live on campus. I share an Internet account with 120,000+ people on any given day (80,000 students and 40,000 staff/faculty). Because Penn State is so large, they have more then 1 IP address; an educated guess would be about 10. Other people who fall into this same category are workers at a large corporation (such as General Electric, General Motors, etc.) or residents of a complex that provides Internet access to its residents. Another words, there are many circumstances where an AdSense administrator would share an IP with thousands of other people over a very wide geographic area and not know 99.99% of the other people.

What can make matters even worse is if one of these groups that share your IP address (for example college students) is also your main audience. I am a student at Penn State and my customers are mainly my fellow students. I provide services such as listing textbooks and other items on eBay and fixing their personal computers. In this case it is inevitable that an AdSense administrator, such as myself, will log into their account with the same IP address as other people that are legitimately viewing the web publisher’s site.

When this happens, your account is suspended and any appeal is useless. If you are planning on becoming an AdSense customer, make sure your primary audience is NOT a group of people that share your IP address.

As you can realize by now, this happened to me. I have tried numerous times to contact Google and explain the situation, and try to find out what I can do to fix the problem. My messages go unanswered. If you would like to contact Google directly because you think this is unfair, here is a direct E-Mail address which is not published on their web site: adsense-adclicks@google.com

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.