Avoid Google Adsense Click Fraud – One of the common questions we receive from publishers and AdSense users is how to prevent fraud. In other words, the visitor clicks on the heavily embedded AdSense ads, putting your account at risk.
If you’ve been around for a while, you might think that once your AdSense account is suspended, you’ll never get it back. Therefore, it makes sense to protect her, especially from behavior that you cannot control.
Avoid Google Adsense Click Fraud
Since this question always comes up, I researched the subject of click fraud and click blasting. I will definitely discuss the threats behind it and provide solutions like click on cheat protection.
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I write from both sides. First, I am a publisher who gets millions of page views per month through ads and networks like AdSense. Secondly, I am an Advanced Ads Pro developer. So this question is very good for me as well.
Click fraud means that a user or device clicks on an advertisement with the intent to harm the publisher or advertiser. First, click fraud is a problem for advertisers who pay for ads. Second, it becomes a problem for the publisher when the advertiser or ad network stops paying for ads due to wrong clicks.
Click fraud also occurs when you click on an ad yourself or ask someone else to click an AdSense ad on your website.
If your mother clicks on ads on your website multiple times to help you earn a living, despite her good intentions, she is also participating in click fraud. He doesn’t mind if he just clicks on the ad he likes.
Click Fraud Monitoring
However, you don’t have to panic about unexpected real clicks on your ad. One click is not necessary. AdSense refers to the said behaviour.
Clicks on Google ads are caused by the user’s genuine interests. Any method that increases clicks or impressions on your Google ads is strictly prohibited. Prohibited practices include, but are not limited to, repetitive clicking or gestures, automated clicks and gestures, and the use of deceptive robots or software. Please note that clicking your own ads for any purpose is prohibited. Google AdSense Program Policy
Likewise, AdSense prohibits encouraging users to click ads by outright opt-outs or placing ads in places where they could be mistaken for other reasons.
You can view click bombs as a kind of click trick. But I thought I’d use a different word to show another motive behind the problem. This is what many preachers fear.
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If you know that AdSense does not accept fraud and can close your AdSense account without notice and prevent not only future AdSense income but unpaid income as well, then your competitors know that too.
Let’s call it “clickbombing” when a user clicks on an AdSense ad on your site to suspend your account and cause you trouble.
You can easily comply with the AdSense rules by not placing AdSense ads on your site. You don’t have to worry about not hitting all your friends and family. I can say from my experience that many people who want to help me click on those who told me at some point. Then I had the opportunity to thank them and ask them to click only when they liked the ad.
None of my friends write much, so I never worried that they might ruin my work.
How Can I Stop Fraudulent Clicks On My Paid Google Ads?
People use cyberbombing to intentionally hurt you, and you can’t do that.
Since you’re not the only publisher feeling helpless about scams, many companies and solutions have popped up over the past few years.
I’ve seen some companies advertising pictures and headlines of someone wearing a mask to protect your AdSense funds from potential thieves.
The solution I tested only prevents fraud and click bombs by hiding the advertisement. You can’t click on something you can’t see. They usually allow the user to click on the ad once and hide it.
Glossary: The Marketing & Click Fraud A To Z
The first is to hide ads in the user’s browser using JavaScript. Stealth means that the same user will not see the advertisement as long as they use the same browser.
The second method identifies the user based on their IP address and stores the address in a database table. The user may switch to another browser or perhaps to another device and not see the same advertisement.
Let us remind you that we are not talking about people who only want your best interest. They probably won’t try to interfere with your security in any way. But if someone wants to harm you, they may try to find a solution to protect you from fraud.
Let’s start with the most obvious question. You are trying to protect your AdSense account from any type of fraudulent click audit. But does this protection apply to the AdSense system itself?
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I’m starting to look at Click Fraud Monitor to see how these clicks are tracked. There are two problems here:
The first problem is the worst here. If AdSense does not accept many tricks of ad code and ad code behavior, developers need to implement some tricks to do so.
This brings us to the second issue. Depending on the selected method, the click may not be tracked over time. Especially when using AJAX to send events to the database, the user may stay on the media page for a long time before saving the information.
In my tests, most of my clicks didn’t read this way. But I can still click multiple times – on a dummy ad, of course.
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Click protection tools hide ads using CSS. Don’t worry if you don’t know what CSS is. But if you know a little about AdSense, this should raise a red flag.
Masking AdSense ads with CSS is prohibited as it does not prevent them from being loaded, but it is still an idea. Because AdSense doesn’t just pay for a click, sometimes it pays for impressions. You can now understand why this is against their rules and on the same level as click fraud.
Ignoring the above issue, using CSS to hide ads is easy for whoever needs it. They can define custom CSS rules that remove hidden ads from their browser and continue to do whatever they want.
I’ve only tested WordPress plugins like Ad Invalid Click Protector (AICP) here, but I’m hoping external services will work too.
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My research led to the development of Advanced Ads Pro’s Click Fraud feature, which removes ad code completely after it hits the door and is therefore compatible with the AdSense system.
You mentioned using the IP address as an alternative to clicking on the security software. If they store this information locally and use server-side PHP to completely hide the ad code on your site, a little CSS hack will hurt you more.
If attackers are serious about harming you, they can use a botnet that hosts different browsers in different locations (and IP addresses). I don’t know if this is a thing. You will need a lot of skills to do this.
The first problem is caching. If you are using a caching solution, there is a higher chance that the page will be cached for visitors who should not be seeing the ad. Subsequent visitors will see a page with the same ad and will not be able to click on it. It can also be the other way around, and a user who shouldn’t see the ad still sees it. Make sure your system uses some form of cache breach such as Advanced Ads Pro for its security tricks.
The Importance Of Detecting Click Fraud Activity By Monitoring Clicks From Your Google Ads Campaigns
Another problem is that sometimes many people use the same IP address. I know many of you don’t know this. We learned this the hard way on our own content platforms when we started blocking certain IP addresses after receiving a large number of pages.
Many visitors complained that they could not access our website. We found that they live in the area or work in a building that shares the same IP address for many users. So when many users from the same area visited our website, we found a thread and blocked them.
In the case of click fraud, this can prevent more users from seeing ads than users who clicked on them.
If you want to protect yourself from botnets, ask your hosting company about their firewall or choose a firewall provider like Cloudflare or Sucuri.
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Do you care about privacy? You may not, but in many countries, you are not allowed to track visitors’ IP addresses. At the very least, you want or require them to do so in your privacy policy.