Today I found that I couldn’t login to Google Adsense to check on my earnings. I found an email from Google informing me that my account has been disabled.
It has come to our attention that invalid clicks and/or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that this was a necessary step to protect the interests of AdWords advertisers.
I have heard horror stories about accounts getting disabled and cutting off the main source of revenue for many business owners. At Google’s whim, their businesses suffer a huge setback.
There’s competition, though, so I’m not worried. It isn’t as if Google is the only way for me to earn money, and in fact I hope that actually selling games becomes a bigger part of it.
I’m appealing this decision, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m not freaking out about it since it isn’t as if I make that much money from it anyway, but I definitely need to look into quality alternatives.
As a side note, if you are trying to be helpful to me and click on an ad, please don’t. Google will see it as invalid click activity.
4 replies on “Invalid Click Activity?”
What constitutes “illegal clicking activity” ?
Basically, under the terms of service with Google, I’m not allowed to ask people to click on the ads on my site. I am not allowed to click on my own ads or have people I know click on them.
So if someone was trying to be nice and click on the ads for my benefit, Google probably saw it as a violation of those terms.
Exact same thing happened to me. They granted the appeal, but they never explained what reason they’d cut me off (for a MONTH) in the first place.
Curiously enough, the experience made me seriously consider dropping them altogether. The month I had no ads, I also had my best month for sales of games. EVER. Only by about $15, but still…
The more I learn about Adsense the less I like it, someone was telling the first 3 impressions from a given user matter, and after that adsenses discounts them, which kind of sucks for a blog that has a stable reader base.