Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Something weird is going on at Google
On several of my sites I run AdSense. I don't make enough to quit working but I do make enough to buy some Wii games every now and then. Starting in August Google began doing some very weird things.
For one thing one of their AdSense people came and said that they automaticaly discount 10% of all AdSense clicks as invalid. This tells me that they have no idea how much click fraud or invalid clicks are going on out there so they just "guess" and hope the AdWords members will be happy. I did not think too much of this when it happened.
In the second half of August my click-through rates on all of my "social media" driven sites began to drop. Then they hit the floor. Sites that routinely saw 100+ clicks a day were now showing as zero clicks. The tracking scripts I run were showing the same amount of clicking on Adsense going on but Google was now discounting almost all of my clicks. The only sites that were not affected were the ones with loyal followings and no social media traffic.
At first I thought it might have just been the normal summer slow down. Revenue from advertising tends to dip in the summer and not pick up again until later September. I did not look to hard at my raw numbers because I figured it was part of the normal cycle of things.
A few days ago I noticed that I was way behind this month as well. when I looked into my AdSense account I noticed that all of my "social media" driven sites were showing single digit clicks every week! These are sites that tend to have a 2% - 3% CTR and now they were sitting near 0.05%!
I started to ask around among my blogging friends that run AdSense and a scary pattern began to emerge. I also found an article on Forbes where one of the big AdSense guys said:
Traffic via an advertising source (not just Google) can never be guaranteed to convert into a sale or whatever. Just because your site sucks is no reason to penalize those who send you traffic.
I know most of you run adblockers and probably do not even care about this but we are talking about a company that makes billions of dollars every year off of this program and treats half of the program members like gold (AdWords) and the other half like criminals (AdSense). If everyone in the AdSense program quit tomorrow Google would be unable to move its Adwords inventory and would be in serious trouble.
At its heart Google is an advertising company.
For one thing one of their AdSense people came and said that they automaticaly discount 10% of all AdSense clicks as invalid. This tells me that they have no idea how much click fraud or invalid clicks are going on out there so they just "guess" and hope the AdWords members will be happy. I did not think too much of this when it happened.
In the second half of August my click-through rates on all of my "social media" driven sites began to drop. Then they hit the floor. Sites that routinely saw 100+ clicks a day were now showing as zero clicks. The tracking scripts I run were showing the same amount of clicking on Adsense going on but Google was now discounting almost all of my clicks. The only sites that were not affected were the ones with loyal followings and no social media traffic.
At first I thought it might have just been the normal summer slow down. Revenue from advertising tends to dip in the summer and not pick up again until later September. I did not look to hard at my raw numbers because I figured it was part of the normal cycle of things.
A few days ago I noticed that I was way behind this month as well. when I looked into my AdSense account I noticed that all of my "social media" driven sites were showing single digit clicks every week! These are sites that tend to have a 2% - 3% CTR and now they were sitting near 0.05%!
I started to ask around among my blogging friends that run AdSense and a scary pattern began to emerge. I also found an article on Forbes where one of the big AdSense guys said:
We monitor signals like Internet protocol addresses and the kinds of browsers people use–for traffic to look real, it has to have the right proportion of visitors using the Firefox browser, Internet Explorer, et. cetera.Translation: Get a high number of Firefox users on your site (Stumbleupon / Digg) and those clicks will be assumed to be invalid.
A very simplistic fraudster might just click on ads, over and over. But of course, we’ve learned to recognize spikes in the click-through rate, the number of times the ad is clicked on for every time it appears.Translation: Get a surge of social media traffic and those clicks will be assumed to be invalid.
The number of clicks that we proactively throw out is less than 10%. So then the question is really: How much are advertisers getting for free thanks to our detection methods?Translation: Google has no problem not paying its AdSense publishers for traffic that they send to Adwords members. It's one thing if Google takes the hit but why should the AdSense publishers also take the hit? If it is click fraud then just ban the publisher but don't defraud them of revenue just because you think someone clicked a link in error or bounced away too fast. I understand not paying (and banning) based on click fraud but as long as the AdSense person sent traffic to the AdWords member site why not pay them?
Traffic via an advertising source (not just Google) can never be guaranteed to convert into a sale or whatever. Just because your site sucks is no reason to penalize those who send you traffic.
I know most of you run adblockers and probably do not even care about this but we are talking about a company that makes billions of dollars every year off of this program and treats half of the program members like gold (AdWords) and the other half like criminals (AdSense). If everyone in the AdSense program quit tomorrow Google would be unable to move its Adwords inventory and would be in serious trouble.
At its heart Google is an advertising company.
Comments
[Edit] Incidentally, it's not that hard to do.