The Adsense Content Network - Is Click Fraud An Issue?

Most of my talk about adsense has in actual fact referred to the Adsnse Search Network - the adverts served at the side of Google search results. But what about the Adsense Content Network - can it be trusted?

The Adsense Content Network is where website owners sign up to display Google Adsense adverts on their websites - as you can see in blocks around these pages. Some people use them as great income earners and I myself have had a lot of success with Compare Mortgage Rates. But which sites do best and how to increase revenue is not really for this post. Maybe an aside one day soon...

Many people worry that by using the Adsense Content Network site owners will be clicking on their adverts to earn extra income. I've no doubt that it happens - it's very tempting. But I know from reports from my customers when they have clicked on their own Google adverts that in these cases no revenue is earned. Google has invested large sums of money to detect this so called 'click fraud' within its Adsense Content Network - to protect the network and the advertisers.

And Google doesn't just have methods of spotting owners clicking on their own ads (which is very eay to do - just watch what IP address you last signed on from and leave a cookie on the machine...), they also watch for other people doing this for the site owner. Google are watching click patterns - monitoring whether click patterns across a site are usual and across a machine. If there's a sudden increase in activity from a particular machine or on a website, Google's analysts will study the click logs and decide whether it looks genuine. If suddenly the click through rate increases on an account, that's looked at. If the click through rate exceeds an expected threshold, they investigate.

So, personally, I don't consider click fraud to be a great issue. Keep a tight reign on your budget and if you are the victim of such targetted attacks then your adverts might stop for the day, which prevents the fraud getting too high. Google should also detect what's been going on and refund you, in some cases it's almost instantly that the refunds take place.