AdSense deductions for Invalid Traffic - How to avoid?

Question

Every month I have a small amount taken from my AdSense payments for "Invalid Traffic".

(I actually just discovered this by taking a look at my "payments" page -- which seems to be the only place this is mentioned. AdSense does not provide alerts or warnings re invalid Traffic)

I have yet to find a solid explanation for what exactly this means.

Some have said that the issue is "Facebook traffic" or "Twitter traffic".

I don't even have a Facebook account, so I have a hard time understanding how I could be directly responsible for any illicit traffic coming from Facebook.

As for Twitter, I do tweet links to content as I assume everyone does.

The amount deducted every month tends to equal about 1 day's earnings -- or about 3.3%

I am certainly not doing any black-hat or illicit link building. And the traffic to the site seems healthy and normal.

Any ideas for how to address this problem and get back that 3% loss?

Answer 1

I think 3.3% is quite okay. You should not worry about it.

If it goes beyond 5%, you should investigate from where you are getting invalid traffic. There are lot of analytics spam, adsense spam going around which may cause this kind of invalid traffic. Basically, these bots visit sites to register themselves in the analytics, adsense reports so that the webmasters visit them when they see them on their reports.

For now, you should concentrate on building better content for your website so you increase your overall adsense revenue. 2-4% going away to invalid traffic is quite common. Also, google started reporting this figure only since last 3-4 months if you are thinking why you haven't spotted this earlier.

Answer 2

Google has a lot of different ways to determine invalid clicks and traffic that is made from bots. This is to prevent advertisers from paying money for no reason.

Google also tries to identity accidental clicks. These clicks are made from normal users, but they happen accidentally.

For example, let's say that you have a blog. A user wants to click the "Read more" button of a post. You have an Google Ad placed next to the "Read me button". The user wants to click the "Read more" button, but he accidentally clicks on the Ad.

When you check your reports, you see sometimes clicks that are getting reset. This happens when Google identifies these clicks as fake (invalid/accidental).

If you observe this a lot, maybe you have not placed the Google Ads correctly.

Personally I would say that 3.3% is an alert, and you need to investigate also the Google Ads placement.

From my experience with Adsense, I concluded that the amount deducted every month is normally no more than 0.1% - 0.2%.

Please make sure that your ads are not next to links or dropdown menus or near the "X" Close button of popups.