Hopefully, you never had any issues with invalid traffic on your YouTube channel. But some people suddenly face having their AdSense account disabled and their monetization stopped because of it. Luckily this can be appealed, but ideally it should not happen in the first place.
AdSense publishers are ultimately responsible for the traffic on those ads. You, as a publisher, need to monitor your ad traffic to ensure that your account is in line with the policies and guidelines of AdSense and ensure that everything is compliant. Monitoring your traffic flow diligently will allow you to notice any changes and report suspicious movements to AdSense here.
Here are some tips to help you prevent invalid traffic on your ads:
This refers to your ad and site traffic. A good way to understand your traffic is to break down the traffic reports into segments such as URL channels or custom channels. This will help you gauge how the changes in traffic sources can affect your ad traffic.
An in debth analysis can be made using Google Analytics. This will allow you to get detailed information on your site visitors and you can monitor for any unusual behaviour. Showing you location and which sections of your website or social media your traffic has come from, understnading your traffic will prove hugely benificial. Setting up the segmentation can seem confusing but is well worth doing and google has provided us with a handy step by step explanation.
Avoid partnering with untrusted parties at all cost. When teaming up with low-quality ad networks, search engines, bots or sites that are supposed to increase visits on your channel, you run risk of creating invalid traffic. This can lead to your AdSense account being disabled and you won’t be able to monetize the ads on your content. This is classed as purchasing your traffic (which, of course, is not prohibited).
You might just be looking at your channel and you suddenly see an ad you’re interested in. Do not click on it!
Clicking on ads on your own content is prohibited. Use the AdSense publisher tool bar instead. If it seems like you are clicking on your own ad to inflate the earnings or up the advertiser’s cost, the account can be disabled to protect the advertiser.
You have the option to use the custom implementations on your ads. But these might have an unintended side effect on the ad requests. Make sure your implementation conforms with the AdSense placement policies to avoid conflicts and if possible, make sure that there are no programming errors.
It’s also always a good shout to check your ads in different browsers to ensure that they play and are places correctly.
AdSense and Google actually have a list of authorized sites feature, giving you the opportunity to specify the sites that your ads appear on and only collect stats from these sites. Be sure to add your sites correctly, to make sure that all the traffics will be added and not filtered out.
If you aren’t sure about details or have a question, it is very likely that some other creators have had the same thoughts. The AdSense Forum will give you a good start to look for answers and join the discussion. And let others know if you have found sites or sources that cause invalid clicks.
If you encountered issues with AdSense and invalid clicks, we are able to help you to enable your account again and give you guidance on how to avoid future problems. Get in touch with your questions.