Top 5 things you should know about invalid clicks

During the AdSense team’s recent policy webinars, a number of publishers posted questions on our Google Moderator page about invalid click activity and the resources available to help them protect their accounts. We’ve brought in experts from the Ad Traffic Quality team to address your top questions about invalid clicks here in this post today.

As a quick introduction, our responsibility on the Ad Traffic Quality team is to monitor traffic across Google’s ad network and prevent advertisers from paying for invalid traffic. We’ve recently launched an in-depth Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, a site designed for both advertisers and publishers to learn more about invalid clicks. This site also aggregates various resources that help you learn about invalid clicks and maintain a successful AdWords or AdSense account. Please note that the resource center is currently only in English, but will be available in all languages shortly.

Now, onto the top 5 topics that publishers most frequently ask about, and some guidance from our team:  

1. Monitoring your ad traffic 

There’s a lot that you can and should do to monitor your site’s traffic and prevent it from receiving invalid activity. You can find all of our suggestions and best practices listed in our Help Center. If at any time you’d like to report something suspicious, feel free to contact us using this form.

2. Returning earnings to our advertisers

Protecting our advertisers' interests by monitoring invalid click activity is one of the key ways we strive to keep the network a balanced ecosystem where users, publishers, and advertisers can all grow and thrive together. To protect the integrity of our advertising environment, we return earnings from disabled AdSense accounts to affected advertisers, as stated in our Disabled Account FAQ.

3. Our mechanisms catch on to trends

Google uses real-time detection and filtering systems to examine each click on an AdWords ad. We look at numerous data points for each click, including the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports. Our engineers are constantly improving our monitoring technology, enhancing filters, and examining a growing set of signals.

In addition to our automated click protection techniques, we have a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When our system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important information about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

4. How we determine sabotage

Sabotage, which some publishers refer to as ‘click bombing’, is an act committed by a third party to generate invalid activity on a publisher’s ads without their knowledge or permission. Although this topic often comes up on our forums and in the questions we’ve received, we’ve found that click bombing represents only a small fraction of invalid activity. As mentioned in point #3, we’re constantly improving our detection systems to identify these patterns of sabotage and filter them as invalid. We’re committed to protecting our publishers as well as our advertisers, as our goal is to grow the network while continuing to ensure that it is safe and enjoyable for all.

5. You can contact us if you feel your account was wrongfully disabled

We want to work with you and provide you as many resources as we can to resolve issues you may have. If your account has been disabled and you feel that the decision was made in error, we have a process for appealing the decision in your account. For more information, see our Help Center.

Taking your channels to a new limit

As you know, channels in your AdSense account are powerful reporting tools. Custom channels help you track ad performance and enable advertisers to target their ads for maximum impact, while URL channels allow you to deep-dive into the performance of AdSense for content on your subdomains.

To date, you’ve been limited to a total of 200 custom and URL channels, and many of you have asked for more. That’s why today, we’re very excited to announce that we’ve raised this limit to 500 custom channels per product, and 500 URL channels for AdSense for content. You’ll see your available custom channels count clearly displayed in the custom channels table, and also highlighted in the “create new custom channel” pop-up.

This change will enable you to expand your testing, and you’ll be able to do more granular analysis of how different formats, ad styles, and ad types perform. In addition, you can use your increased allocation of custom channels to create new ad placements for advertisers to target directly. This can help increase the amount you earn from placement targeting, as advertisers will be able to review the information you’ve provided about your ad units to match their campaigns to your site and audience. As the holidays approach and advertisers look to create additional placement targeted campaigns, now is the perfect time to set up more custom channels and ad placements.

Log in to your AdSense account today and visit your My ads tab to get started.

Create a mobile-friendly website

Did you know that there will be a mobile device for every person on earth by 2015, and that mobile searches have grown by 4x since 2010¹? That means that every day more and more of your users are looking for your content…on mobile devices. What’s their experience like? Can they easily read what’s on the screen without pinching and zooming? Do you have links that are difficult to click instead of user-friendly navigation buttons?

61% of users are unlikely to return to a site that isn’t mobile friendly². It’s important to remember that even if users can see a website on a smartphone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. Your users are going mobile as we speak, and so the most important thing you can do to grow your business using the mobile web is to create a mobile-friendly website.

Here are ten tips to help you design a mobile-friendly site:

1. Keep it quick - Design your site to load fast and make copy easy to scan
2. Simplify navigation - Create clear navigation and search functionalities
3. Be thumb-friendly - Design your site so any size hand can easily interact with it
4. Design for visibility - Make it easy for your customers to read
5. Make it accessible - Mobile sites should work across all mobile devices
6. Make it easy to convert - Create clear ways for your users to make purchases or contact you
7. Make it local - Consumers look for local info on their phones all the time
8. Make it seamless - Convert as much of the functionality of your desktop site to mobile
9. Use mobile site redirects - Ensure that visitors who visit your website from a mobile device are redirected to your mobile-friendly site
10. Listen, learn and iterate - Make testing and optimization an ongoing process

To review a detailed set of these best practices, download a copy of the 10 Mobile Site Best Practices. Visit howtogomo.com to explore actual mobile site examples of each best practice and use the GoMoMeter to see how your site is faring on mobile*.



Finally, take a look at Google Sites for Mobile Landing Pages*, a free and easy-to-use tool that enables you to build mobile pages.

¹Gartner, 2010; Google Internal Data, 2011; Cisco, 2011
²Compuware and Brand Anywhere and Luth Research
*Note: These resources are currently only available in English, but will be available in other languages shortly.

How to monetize your mobile-friendly website

In our previous blog post we talked about how to create a mobile-friendly website. Now we’d like to show you how to best monetize your mobile site with AdSense Mobile product offerings.

AdSense for Mobile Content
AdSense for mobile content allows publishers to generate earnings from their mobile web pages using targeted Google ads. Below are some key features.

• Contextual targeting ensures ads match the content of your mobile site.
• Google advertisers bid directly for your mobile inventory.
• Mobile-specific ad formats are optimized for the small screen.

For mobile websites, AdSense automatically detects the type of phone viewing your site and delivers ads to match. For example, if someone views your site through a high-end smartphone, we'll deliver mobile ads specifically designed for the device’s full HTML browser.

It’s important to note that AdSense for mobile content ad units are meant to be used in mobile websites and not mobile applications - as noted in our policies. If you’re looking for an advertising solution for your mobile application, sign up for AdMob.

Custom Search Ads for Mobile 

If you currently use Custom Search Ads for your desktop, we’re happy to let you know that publishers can now also apply to use this feature on mobile sites and apps. Custom Search Ads for Mobile are highly targeted ads that are based on user queries from a mobile website.

These ads typically monetize at a high rate and publishers are able to customize the look and feel of the ads to best integrate with the user experience on the page. The ads can be fixed to the frame or scroll along with the results.

If you're already an AdSense publisher and want to get started with ads on your mobile site, you’ll find the Mobile Content button under the ‘My Ads’ tab. If you're not a publisher yet, sign up.

Set up a crawler login for increased ad relevancy on pages behind a login

This is the second post in our two-part AdSense Crawler Errors series.

Recently we discussed ways to improve ad targeting and relevancy by making sure that the AdSense crawler can view all pages that have AdSense code on them. Sometimes though, it can become problematic when a publisher has a members only site that requires the user to log in to view the site’s content. In cases like this, the AdSense ads that are located behind the login aren’t as relevant and targeted as they could be.

If you’re a publisher with content behind a login page, be sure to set up an AdSense crawler login so that your ads are as well-targeted as possible. Doing so will give the AdSense crawler the ability to scan content on these pages, resulting in more relevant, targeted ads that can potentially increase your CTRs and revenue. Please note that adding a crawler login will only help to deliver better, more relevant ads to pages with AdSense code already on them, and will not have any effect on which pages of your site Google Search will index.

To grant the AdSense crawler access, log in to your AdSense account and click on ‘Account settings.’ From there, scroll down to the ‘Access and authorization’ section and click on ‘edit logins’ next to crawler logins.

Then click on ‘Add a Login.’ You’ll be prompted to fill in pertinent information that the AdSense crawler will use to log in to your site and crawl your content.

After that, you’ll need to log in to Webmaster Tools to verify your website, if you haven’t already done so. Once verified, the crawler will be able to log in successfully and scan your content to deliver more targeted ads.

For additional information, take a look at our help center article regarding displaying ads on login-protected pages.

Introducing ad styles: an enhanced feature replacing color palettes

If you’ve been following our announcements in the last few weeks, you know we’ve been committed to bringing you features that you’ve been missing from the old AdSense interface. We’re now launching another long-requested feature: ad styles. Ad styles extend and enhance all of the functionality of our old color palettes. With ad styles, you can create customized combinations of colors, fonts, and corner styles and then easily apply these to the ad units and search engines across your site.

The best part about ad styles is that when you edit an ad style in the new interface, any ad units or search engines that are using this style will automatically be updated with your changes. So if you want to test a new color for the ad units on your site to see how it performs, you can create a new ad style and apply it to some of your ad units. If it performs well you can then apply it to all of the ad units in your account or revert back to your old colors just as easily. We think this feature will save you time by eliminating the need to re-assign the colors to each ad unit individually.

To create a new ad style, visit the ‘My ads’ tab. Click ‘Ad styles’ in the navigation bar and then the ‘+New’ button. You can then assign existing ad styles to your ad units during the ad unit creation process.

Policy webinars recap

Based on your feedback from our previous blog posts, we’ve heard you’d like to learn more about our policies. Over the past few months, the AdSense Policy team has hosted webinars with publishers from across North America, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Italy, and France. In keeping with our monthly policy tips, we’d like to take this time to recap on our recent publisher events and to summarize our findings for you.

Policies are in place for the success of publishers and advertisers. One of the common pieces of feedback we hear from AdSense publishers who are just starting out is that there’s a lot of information to read about the program. We understand that it can be challenging navigating our policies, and frustrating not being able to talk to a policy specialist directly. As a result, our policy team was available to answer your top questions during these recent webinars. In addition, the Policy team delivered a condensed overview of common policy violations to avoid and general best practices and tips to help maintain your account in good standing.

We went through a run-through of live demos and examples, which attendees told us were helpful. Many found that overall the sessions were helpful and that they gained a good understanding of our policies. Many publishers were unaware of the resources available to help you with policy notifications in our Help Center. We’ve posted your top policy questions and our answers on our Google Moderator page, which we encourage you to take a look at. If you’d like to listen to a recording of our presentation, please watch our YouTube video.

We’d like to thank all of you for your great feedback and questions. If you found the policy webinars valuable or have suggestions on which topics you’d like to hear about next, let us know by leaving a comment below. If you’re interested in attending future events like these, make sure that you’re opted in to ‘Special Offers’ in your email preferences within your AdSense account. We look forward to hosting more policy webinars in the future, and look for more policy updates from us by subscribing to the AdSense blog.