Internet Business Blog

Google posted an entry to their AdSense blog earlier this week stating that most misclicks by AdSense vendors were automatically discounted.

…chances are we’ve already detected your clicks on your ads and discounted them.

Google can identify a large percentage of your clicks with good accuracy. The other portion - they can throw out as a purely educated guess. They don’t have to be 100% certain to be able to toss a click out with a high degree of confidence that the click was errant or fraudulent.

How does Google know that you’ve been clicking your own ads?

1. Cookies. Simple but true. GOOG places a cookie, and every time that you click – assuming the cookie is still there – they will know about it.

2. Your IP address matches those that have logged into the Adsense control panel.

3. You page view behavior matches an owners page view behavior. This is by far the most common method used by Google. It is easy to ID an owner of a site after very few numbers of page views. Google simply tracks your ip behavior as you view your own site and ads are served to you. Read some of the recent stuff on click fraud - it is pretty clear this is the top way Google is tracking bad clicks.

4. Additionally, the majority of IP’s on the cable networks are dynamic, but dynamic within a block. Thus, it is deducible to know that if Bob’s ISP is Comcast and a Comcast address has viewed 200 pages on his site and the same C block logged into his control panel, and the same d block is on the Cookie - given his path behavior - it is pretty safe bet we can throw out those clicks.

5. Let’s say that you’re using a piece of stock blog software or blog service. Many of those pieces of software allow one template and one template only. So you serve Google ad code, to even your blog administration panel. Google sees an attempt to load an ad from a restricted url on your site - bingo, it has you. The number of blind urls Google would have to check against would be less than 10 to match 90+% of the major blogging software out there.

6. Google Toolbar. If you use it, Google is tracking you!

To make a long story short, Google knows who you are so be careful. Just some food for thought.

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