Got 86% ctr on adsense - someone click bombarding

[linkchamp]

Someone trying bombard one of my site with huge amount of ad clicks.

What remedy should be taken?

The amount increased to 350+ usd in last 2 hours.

The page ctr is 85% which is pretty high. I just have 2 ad units in a page with 7000+ words.

How do i tackle this kind of clicks as thos are coming from usa, uae and many contries.

Any advice?

 

[Grudge]

Check the user agents they are using, there might be a pattern there.

 

[vigyavan]

Check with Hotjar, see what's going on with site!

 

[provocative]

If you don't take any action soon, you will probably lose your Adsense account according to their TOS. And you will really struggle to get your account back, if you can not prove that you were under attack with a solid proof.

Hotjar is great idea, also you can try to users IPs. There should be some plugins as well preventing multiple clicks in a set time limit.

 

[linkchamp]

I have disabled ads as of now and reported to google for invalid clicks. I Will do some IP digging tonight, this is really irritating and frustrating.

I have this AdSense account for more than 10 years, so I think that will have some trust factor going. I've never met this kind of issue in the past.

Installed - https://clarity.microsoft.com/ (Hotjar Alternate for FREE)

Would update on whether Google f**ked my account or not.

 

[HenryObi]

I have disabled ads as of now and reported to google for invalid clicks. I Will do some IP digging tonight, this is really irritating and frustrating.

I have this AdSense account for more than 10 years, so I think that will have some trust factor going. I've never met this kind of issue in the past.

Installed - https://clarity.microsoft.com/ (Hotjar Alternate for FREE)

Would update on whether Google f**ked my account or not.

You made the right decision. Hopefully the guys at Adsense support help out.

 

[linkchamp]

Some updates I wanted to share with all.

1) I didn't hear back from google after submitting the invalid data multiple times. I reported everything in detail, showed some IP's that looked shady. (hmmm, I didn't expect Google to reply to me. )

2) I have removed the ads but still, ads are getting impressions. I don't know how the hell that can happen.

---- I have cleared the cache.
---- Varnish cache is cleared too.
---- CDN cache cleared too.
---- I checked google cache as well, no ads are displayed.
---- Checked Adsense account, no ads appearing outside my website.

Just not able to find how the ads are still appearing and getting impressions.
Because I was never a fan of Adsense I don't have many projects in this niche. I certainly felt helpless working with Google Adsense, someone hitting and I just can't do anything.


I checked all the logs, found some shady shits, but what I found was, there were some residential proxies being used mostly to do this.

Biggest concerns as of now are, how do I find where the hell Ads are showing because practically they don't exist on the site at all.

 

[provocative]

Quick solution is: removing the adsense main/header code.

 

[SHAYZO]

Hotjar

 

[TMONEX]

Remove the ad units from your Adsense account. Google will likely limit you for invalid clicks in the next three days if this continues. Then investigate your traffic and find a way to normalize it.

 

[linkchamp]

Hotjar

I have already added Microsoft clarity, its similar to hotjar but FREE.

Quick solution is: removing the adsense main/header code.

As i mentioned prior, there isn't any adsense code on the site.

Remove the ad units from your Adsense account. Google will likely limit you for invalid clicks in the next three days if this continues. Then investigate your traffic and find a way to normalize it.

Based on your suggestions, I've archived the ad units from the Adsense account.

I'm still trying to figure out how some 50+ impressions happen on the site that generated more than 10K clicks on the site. Because the Adsense codes were removed almost 5 days back. There's no point of cache or any piece of AdSense code being left on the site.

I somehow feel there was some trick the guy is using to fire the AdSense codes and injecting within the pages to render it.

 

[linkchamp]

Finally, Google Limited the Adsense Account for "Invalid Traffic".

I'm not taking any steps as of now.

Just one thing to note, even though I removed all ads something was triggering ads without my notice. Nothing got caught on Hotjar/ Clarity etc.

I read somewhere that "Ads.txt" should have been removed from the root domain, but I'm not sure how would that affect it. Ads were not loading on the front side and just can't figure out how the ads were clicked if they were not actually loading.

 

[syphaxmail]

Why don't you disable those ads unit in google adsens?

 

[djayz]

i faced something similar recently.. your website was probably under a DDoS attack like mine. Running my website through Cloudflare and enabling Under attack mode solved this for me. You should do same.

 

[nakamura]

Finally, Google Limited the Adsense Account for "Invalid Traffic".

And this is exactly why Google are a bunch of mofos. You immediately took action and even messaged them - no reply, but here we are: You got your account limited. Exact same shit happened to me. It took 3 months for the limits to disappear and after 2 weeks I suddenly appeared again.

 

[linkchamp]

Why don't you disable those ads unit in google adsens?

I disabled (Archived - so they don't generate impressions) the "Ad Units" from the Adsense account itself. However, they were still were generating like 100/200 impressions that were generating 10K+ Clicks. Additionally, the ads were not running from the site too. The only thing which was there on the site was "Ads.txt" within the root domain.

i faced something similar recently.. your website was probably under a DDoS attack like mine. Running my website through Cloudflare and enabling Under attack mode solved this for me. You should do same.

It was not DDOS for sure, I have other sites with high traffic and i have faced uplink traffic of 10GBPS DDOS. However, I have cloudfare pro account that I would use for this site to see if there are such instances.

And this is exactly why Google are a bunch of mofos. You immediately took action and even messaged them - no reply, but here we are: You got your account limited. Exact same shit happened to me. It took 3 months for the limits to disappear and after 2 weeks I suddenly appeared again.

Yeah, I tried my best to rectify and take prompt actions but seems any
The biggest setback for me is I had this account for more than a decade, and "In one week" someone can just destroy the credibitility you've build for years.

I never relied on Adsense as I've seen people losing their accounts for no reason.

I wanted to post the exact thing happening with the site so others can learn how things happen even when you're not doing anything wrong.

Bottom line - Adsense should never be your Primary Source of Income!

 

[djayz]

Your Website was under attack trust me.. I used analytics to trace the invalid traffic to US. My adsense rose up to 2k in 2hrs at first instance of the attack.

Your case might be different though.. But using Cloudflare should fix it.

 

[vigyavan]

To remove ad serving limit from your account within 2 weeks is to

1. Turn off Auto ads
2. You already archive ads so fine
3. Remove ads.txt file from root directory
4. Remove the post on which you were getting most clicks

Give it 2 weeks

 

[gihanzami]

I've seen this BAD advice so many times. I advise you not to remove ad codes and ads.txt files. Just leave them as is. Otherwise, Google will take a long time to lift the limit. When your Adsense is limited, Google will use these ad units to evaluate your traffic, and when more organic traffic and genuine impressions come it will automatically get lifted. (When the account is limited, your ad fill rate is at 1%.)

In order to prevent this from happening again, you can take several actions. First, set up some alerts on Google Analytics, for referral traffic, self-referrals, bounce rate, and in your case CTR. So in the future, you will immediately receive an email if these alerts are triggered.

Then install a good WAF like Cloudflare or Imperva (bit expensive). But installing Cloudflare is not enough and you have to configure it properly. From Cloudflare apps, turn on Turnstil for your domain and it will show you the IP addresses of your visitors. If they are coming from a bad source (as referrals), you have to put a firewall rule to block traffic from that referrer. If they are coming as direct visits you have to block their IP ranges using the firewall. Most of the time these visits come from the same network so you can simply just put their ASN in the firewall and block them all. If you have decent organic traffic and have not removed the ads, Google will lift your limit even under two weeks. I wish you the best of luck! hope your limit will get lifted soon.

 

[linkchamp]

Finally, the adsense limit is lifted. I will update in next few days once all is back to normal.

However, i lost all ads revenue for nov and dec. They forfieted revenue considering invalid clicks.

For anybody that want to know what steps i took, i'll compile something in a day or two and publish here.