I am currently phasing out AdSense. I’ll get paid at the end of the month so I will turn off all of my ads before then. The ads on here are already gone.

As for direct publishers, I charge a flat monthly rate and offer no guarantees. the only thing I can point to is past performance which can not be used as an indicator of future results (just like the stock market). What I also offer many advertisers is a 15 day free trial. If after 15 days the ad is not making you happy than I remove it and you are out nothing.

Click fraud is likely to be very hard to detect but in my particular case if all of my clicks are fraudulent i would expect to be banned from Google. Look at the numbers because the discount rate applied to me is far higher than 10%!

I opined some time ago that the quickest way to kill CPC advertising (and AdSense) would be for all of the diggers in the world to turn off their AdSense and be sure to click an ad on every site they visit via digg. Perhaps they have already started doing this and that is why Google appears to be discounting all of my social media traffic that generates clicks?

If click fraud became a more serious problem, and Google (or someone else) could not contain it, they would be forced to drop the sources of traffic that are the most difficult to determine whether fraudulent activity occurred. This means they would need to continue to drop AdSense sites that are questionable sources of traffic, or even close down the program altogether.

If you sold space on your sites directly to advertisers, who were getting low ROI, what would you do? How would you convince them to continue to advertise?

In general, I have expressed my doubts about Google’s claims, but I can’t fault their decisions to issue refunds (if the alternative was that they would drop out of the program altogether).

WRT browsers, my guess is Google keeps trends of various types of usage on sites, and they look for overall correlation with other sources. So if the Firefox (for example) usage exceeds some threshhold on some sites, it raises a warning flag. I wonder how they will handle mobile AdSense, however. For example, there are people who use the browsers that come with phones, but others who use browsers from tablets and PDAs. Some of these are from well-known companies, but others are of the homebrew open-source type. So a spike in that usage could be fraudulent, but could also constitute broader adoption of one of the newer browsers. This is just an example of how difficult it is to detect fraud, because there are other possible scenarios. But the fraudsters know this, so they can exploit the uncertainty. But there is no win-win situation, because either advertisers are overcharged (for poor ROI), they drop out of content networks, or the engine has to issue refunds.

I have already dropped the Google Ads from rotation on PokeFarm (may take time for AdBrite to adjust) except for the very bottom one on site. I may not be a huge AdSense publisher but I do provide Google with over 400K AdSense impressions every month when you factor in all the various sites I own.

If there was some way I could test the tracking without resorting to click-fraud I would. The only thing I could think of would be to open up an AdWords account and pay for CPM on my own site and ask people to click ONLY on my own CPM ads but that is just too much work and a pain. Instead I will just replace the Google AdSense blocks with AdBrite blocks and see how the CTR goes.

It will not be foolproof because it also depends on how relevant the resulting advertising is. I’m trying to get into Yahoo Publisher but no response from them yet.

The thing is, out of all of the sites I run both MBL and AdSense on this one (hmtk) is the only one showing this huge difference. It is also the only one with “spikey” social media traffic.

I am seriously beginning to think that Google is looking at social media (as a whole) as click-fraud and discounting clicks that come from soneone who arrived via social media.

Question for you Matt. Look at your incoming numbers, is your click data off every day or only on days where you get a large amount of social media traffic?

Sept 2007 (so far):
- MBL 1588
- Adsense 1244

August was way, way off between the two. I’d love to get credit for those missing 800 clicks.