How does Google detect fraud / invalid clicks

Now a days, getting an Adsense account for your website is very difficult, as Google has gone too strict in approving Adsense applications due to increased fraud activities.

Why do people involve in fraud activities?
Many reasons can be listed out for this, but the common reasons that tempt people to involve in fraud activities are

• Lack Of Patience
• Curiousity About Making Money With Adsense

What are considered as fraud activities?
Anything against Google TOS(Terms Of Service) will be considered as a fraud activity. Some most common fraud activities are,

• Clicking advertisements on your website from same or different computer
• Encouraging friends or visitors to click advertisement on your website
• Programming a BOT
• Hiding Advertisements behind images

Anyway, Google is too smart. If you involve yourself in any kind of fraud activities Google will find you, and your Adsense account will be banned. Do you like to put your hard earned Adsense account in a risk of getting banned? No, nobody likes to, but still due to curiosity of earning money people risk their Adsense account by involving in fraud activities.

Remember! Once you are banned from Adsense you can’t get an Adsense account for your website again. Fine, Now let’s get into the topic “How Google Detect Fraud Clicks?”

1. IP Address
Tracing your IP address through a website is very easy(even wordpress does), and Google can do it perfectly that they can even find your address exactly. When several clicks originate from same IP address Google will consider it as a fraud and also if clicks originate from an IP that has accessed your Adsense account before, then Google will decide that you clicked advertisements on your own website. Which is against TOS.

2. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Normally, Click through Rate should not excess 10%. Otherwise, Google will flag your account. For your information, normal CTR should ranges from 0.5% – 10%.

3. Cookies
If you look at your browser cookies you can find that there are cookies saved by Adsense. So, even if you change your IP by reconnecting to internet, Google will trace you with cookies that it has already saved on your web browser.

4. Location
Google has a powerful tracing system, that they can even trace the origin down to small towns. So, clicking advertisements from different internet cafe or from computer with different IP address does not work.

5. Hit & Run
When you encourage your friends to click on advertisement, they usually click on advertisements and just close the window before the advertiser’s web site loads, because they didn’t click the advertisements with interest a visit the advertiser’s website. If this pattern of clicks are more then, your account will be flagged.

6. Other Google Services
Don’t think you can be safe if you click on advertisements without logging into your Adsense account, there are so many other services that Google provides to the you(like Gmail, Adwords etc). They might trace your IP or Location through other Google services too.

Are you involved in any of these fraud activities? Then stop them immediately, prevent your Adsense account from getting banned!