I collected the information from the Google Adsense Live Webinar held a few days ago:
- What is Invalid Traffic?
• Does not represent genuine user interest or intent e.g. accidental clicks caused by intrusive ad implementations
• Publishers clicking their own live ads or
encouraging users to clicks on their ads
• Fraudulent clicking by competing advertisers„ ad
fraud botnets and more
• Any invalid traffic designed to increase ad traffic while
pretending to be genuine.
• Click farms (A click farm is a business that pays employees to click on website elements to artificially boost the status of a client's website or a product)
• Automated browsing
• Session hijacking and botnets
- Best Practices To Prevent Invalid Traffic
• I'ts important that all AdSense publishers regularly review
their traffic and ad implementations
• Review AdSense Program Policies
• Understand your ad traffic and site visitors
• Be very careful when purchasing traffic
• Double- and triple-check your ad implementations
• Use the authorized sites feature to prevent
unauthorized use of your ad code
• Don't click your own ads
• Google Publisher Toolbar
• Look for abnormal spikes in Impressions/Clicks/CTR
• Manual detection and Looking into reported cases of invalid traffic
• Issues flagged by our advertisers, publishers, and
automated systems
• Segment traffic to explicitly see your different traffic
sources
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics
- How Google prevents invalid traffic
• Google takes invalid traffic very seriously. We use over a
hundred complex algorithms to spot bad traffic
• Automated filters
• Filtering in real-time
• Filtering in near real-time
• Manual detection and review
• Our team uses advanced research to uncover sources of
non-human traffic and develop solutions to keep them
from entering our networks and platforms.
• Keeping invalid traffic from impacting you
• Over 180 sophisticated filters
• Cutting-edge technology