Nonsense with Google's AdSense? 85
OmnipotentEntity asks: "I usually come down hard on the side of Google, as I feel that they have a good philosophy and they follow it. However, a forum I regularly visit had a run in with the bad side of Google's AdSense program, and our AdSense account was terminated because of 'invalid click activity.' Some research by a fellow member of the boards turned up other people facing the same problems we ran into. These problems seem localized to sites hosted in Europe. I'm an American, so I have no clue about the European side of AdSense. Have any of our European webmasters ran into the same problems, or are these simply isolated incidents? Is anyone in America experiencing similar difficulties?"
At last, a story to fit my username :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't comment on the site in question, but in general AdSense and web forums are not always a good match. Forums often get a fairly small number of highly active viewers, which give rise to one of two phenomena: a) they don't click on the ads much (low clickthru rate), and when they do it sticks out statistically like a sore thumb, leading to possible (mis)interpretation regarding click fraud; or b) the more enthusiastic users take it upon themselves to click regularly on ads to support their forum, which will also raise a few red flags.
Forums can sometimes do well with AdSense if they have a high ratio of "read only" users and take steps such as not showing ads to logged in users.
The bigger you are... (Score:3, Insightful)
The better you are treated. Seems obvious, but there are a quite a few small publishers that don't make enough for Google to go to any trouble over. Fraudulent click activity? If the advertisers are getting angry, its easier just to say "We have banned the site in question." than to actually find and deal with the source of the problem. They need to be seen to strike a balance - and it's much easier to be harsh to someone that is only bringing your company $100 / week than someone who brings in $100k / week.
A touch cynical? Perhaps, but consider that: they have recently made some Big Changes(TM) to they way they crawl (aka Big Daddy(TM)); they have admitted a storage problem; and their stock has slipped recently. What better message to send to publishers that "We are tough on fraudulent clicks" to restore confidence.
I'm not bashing them. Seriously. Business is business. They run their advertising program, they determine the TOS and how they are applied. It's not like alternatives aren't avaliable (one recently launched at the Center of attention...). Anyway, it isn't all bad news. There is a publisher who netted over $1M from AdSense in three short months. Yes, you heard me, net. And this publisher isn't a corp, business or big team. Just one guy with a whole lotta pageviews. I bet he's treated very well by the folks at the 'plex...
So while ther may indeed be a problem/conspiracy/whatever, do consider that 1) they may actually be engaging in click fraud (eg "drawing undue attention to advertisements") or 2) they may be more of a liability than they are worth.
Re:My site and.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't give you details on the invalid clicks because it would make things a lot easier for people to reverse engineer the process they use to detect them.
You might have lost $100, but I think it's pretty clear that the amount of money Google could cheat people out of isn't anywhere near as high as the amount of money they stand to lose should Adsense's legitimacy be seriously questioned. Remember, advertising is one of Google's main cash cows. They need Adsense to survive. They don't need to scam a few people out of $100 here and there to survive.
The real question is - how can Google preserve the secrecy of their invalid click determination while still not screwing over people who haven't done anything wrong? Or, alternatively, how can they get the job done without having to keep it a secret?
I can't see any easy answers to those questions, which is why I'm hesitant to start accusing Google of screwing up. Do you have any ideas as to what Google can do in their situation?
Re:My site and.... (Score:5, Insightful)
My point is, there are less drastic ways of handling things than cutting us off at the knees with zero recourse. We don't even get paid for the VALID clicks we generated, and they got weeks or months of space on our site.
On the gripping hand, we agreed to the TOS... That was our fault...
Re:No review? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My site and.... (Score:1, Insightful)
This makes sense if they can detect them with near 100% accuracy.
There's nothing stopping them from warning people either, "hey, we see some unusual activity here, you should look into XYZ for solutions".
This makes sense if they have a relatively decent accuracy and a somewhat high false positive rate.
Judging from their behavior, I'd say that they have a very low accuracy in detecting these invalid clicks. And they probably have a higher false positive rate than they think they do. It's not really a surprise that they don't want to give anything away if they're already having a really hard time of it.