You are not the only one.

A year ago back for 5 years or more I could tell you what my earnings would be on any given day with a high degree of accuracy.

A year ago that stopped and earnings have become more and more erratic as time goes by. It may be that the earnings are truly more erratic, it may be that they have always been that way but in previous years G evened them out - it could be 1 of a hundred reasons.

What does beggar belief though is how I can have recorded earnings in excess of £50 from one particular ad unit at 14.00 in the afternoon and then by 16.00 the earnings are recorded at £4. Similar happens frequently nowadays. And it's not always the same ad unit, it's variable. This has been going on for months.

And what does a reduction from £50 to £4 mean? Is G trying to tell me something, is it really £46 of invalid clicks, is it a bug in the G systems - I've not the vaguest idea.

My latest conspiracy theory is that it's not me that is under attack, it's G who are under attack and my site and others are just in the middle. Why else would G accept £46 of invalid clicks as par for the course? How can they run a business when things like that happen which are out of their control?

I agree with you that it's Google that's the target.

Rannans, you can ask Google to explain, but they won't give you any details beyond the fact that it's invalid click activity.

In a way, they can't. Because whatever goes on in the AdSense network is also going on for AdWords. If I get a ton of extra clicks in my account from invalid activity, that means that that amount was (even momentarily) deducted from some advertisers' budgets, which means that may affect their ability to participate in the auction, which leads to reduced advertiser confidence, which leads to the whole house of cards getting really really wobbly.

Why is it that a major portion (I didn't say all) of the complaints about invalid click activity come from publishers outside the US and/or from publishers of websites that cater to a world audience? Anyone ever think to ask themselves that telling question? Could it be same reason that spam attacks, hacker attempts and myriad other problems are also much more likely to be coming from outside the US than from within? I personally block most non-US traffic and only on rare occasions do I see evidence of invalid click activity. If this board really needs another thread on invalid click activity, then perhaps it's time to start identifying the root of the problem or at least being transparent about the circumstances surrounding the invalid activity. My first question is always, what Adsense terms are you violating that would cause such a high rate of invalid activity. Next comes the question of where your visitors are coming from. Can't even begin to list the problems caused by traffic from China, Russia and India all on their own.

My first question is always, what Adsense terms are you violating that would cause such a high rate of invalid activity.

That's it for me. You have no idea what this is.

Erratic earnings are generally a symptom of low traffic. If this is the case then work on your site, build your traffic, and your earnings will be relatively stable.

thanks for the responses all.

my site in question receives anywhere between 700-1000 uniques a day, so maybe that could be considered low traffic

is it possible that adwords people have the ability to TEST ads, then retract any clicks if it cost them too much ? just a thought

..about invalid click activity come from publishers outside the US and/or from publishers of websites that cater to a world audience

Umm.. we do live in a world economy. And there are legitimate reasons for many sites to have visitors from outside the US. Heck, on an ecommerce site we run, (no AdSense on that one) we get foreign traffic and have gotten foreign orders for shippable products.

Among the problems we've seen with the bots or whatever is causing the invalid clicks in AdSense, is that there is no unusual activity showing in our log files even when we can pin down pretty closely the time when the clicks started or the ad units involved. So there's no way to identify a specific location to block.

my site in question receives anywhere between 700-1000 uniques a day

Yes, this is a low traffic site.

I think this is one of the hardest things for people to understand. You get that first bit of traffic (and I still remember that first time seeing a site I owned rank on a search engine - it was one of the best highs ever) and it seems amazing. You hit a few hundred a day and you feel like you are king of the world. But the traffic you are getting is just the tip of the iceberg.

AdSense does not really even out until you are getting 5-10K a day, at least.

And there are legitimate reasons for many sites to have visitors from outside the US.

But sites that get traffic outside the US are targets for hackers and spammers. It is just a sad fact that in areas like China, Russia and India, an individual makes a good living if they can scam a system for $10 a day. In these same areas, gangs run rampant, so scams get even worse - exponentially.

While the internet is a world economy, it is not an equal place. In general, it just reflects the physical world.

we do live in a world economy

Yes we do and this isn't an assault on people trying to do business outside the US (particularly if they don't even live in the US). The point is that a site that takes traffic from anywhere is that much more susceptible to certain nefarious activities.

It's hard to hold someone in another country responsible for much of anything given that you're dealing with cross jurisdictional issues. This makes it more tempting for hackers and other nefarious types to look for targets outside their own country. Webmasters in Europe, I think have a more Global perspective than we do in the US sometimes given that they're surrounded by a variety of different countries (all with different laws and regulations). Countries there are closely packed together like states are in the US. People run around the EU like we jump from state to state. The difference in the US is that we're still in the same country under the same laws so we've got a lot of territory to serve before crossing the border. The audience is a lot smaller if you're just catering to the Swiss on the other hand.

The point here is that invalid click activity seems to be most reported by webmasters from outside the US which leads me to wonder if this issue is generally caused by traffic from certain regions of the world that are reaching out and touching sites with no regional filtering in their firewall because it's easier than messing with sites in another country that are blocking them. All I can say is that because of the nature of my site, non-North American traffic is mostly a nuisance so I block it. The minute I did this, hacking attempts were cut by 95% or more and I'm thinking this invalid click activity has a similar root. If you have to market to the world, then you have to do it. My point is that I see a lot of non-US webmasters regularly complaining about this to the point where it makes on wonder if this is more prevalent outside the US than within. My personal experience seems to support that conclusion and if it's the case, then it's a variable in this discussion which, thread after thread, continues to be ignored.

And if anyone thinks regional issues don't apply, all you have to do is see that Google and the EU just "settle" a dispute regarding search which will have them operating differently in the EU than they do here in the US. And that's just the tip of the iceberg where regional factors are concerned.

Up, down, up, down, down... I have never seen anything like this. I am 27% below last month at this time which was 25% below the previous month.

Since I have no way to monitor which of my users are clicking on what ads there is essentially no way to determine if Google is at fault or if it is really bots. Plus there is no accounting by Google for why they are not allowing some clicks but not others.

Or any accounting, really, by Google.

I have problems with US visitors because 90% clicks from US and above 10c Big G removes from my stats. Each day I'm losing 50% of my earnings.

AdSense does not really even out until you are getting 5-10K a day, at least.

I think this statement could use a little qualification for certain circumstances. If you have a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and the entire site is getting 1000 page views a day, it takes significantly longer for G to figure out the content on each of those pages than if you're running a single-page site for example and getting a thousand visits a day to that one page. On the site with many pages, each page may only get a few views a day (and some might not get any for long periods of time). The more diverse the content on the site is and more pages there are sharing those one thousand page views can effect how quickly things "even out" if you can call it that.

this is getting ridiculous with my site

during today, i have checked every hour

got as good as 26 click for $15+, went down to 12 clicks $8, now its 4 clicks at $0.96

it's an absolute joke, so much so, i really do think google is skimming off all the good $ clicks and keeping it for themselves

if it is a bot, then why has it taken the last 8 hours, to separate between 26 clicks

Funny, today I got skimmed and brought down the the exact same CPC and CTR of as yesterday. Had about 2,500 unique visitors yesterday amazing with so many people how I get skimmed and it makes a match. If I were paranoid I would think Google are screwing me :) - however yesterday was a good day for my earnings with average number of visitors but higher CPC.

I've seen earnings come and go this month, a lot more fluctuation throughout the day than ever before. I've also seen those messages in AdSense telling me the stats aren't accurate, etc. So something is definitely up "behind the scenes". I wish they'd just get things going normal again.

@Ger02 recently i had exact number of clicks 2 days in a row and just 1c difference in earnings, 4k uv

now, a good week into my observations, and still every other hour , my earnings go from $18 , down to $10, then up to $15 ....

the end daily result is $2

what the hell is going on

if this is an attack on my site, then surely google would have contacted me by now

funny, that google always seems to keep my daily earning just inline +- 2 % of daily earnings

this just stinks

My reported earnings have fluctuated wildly as well throughout the past few weeks. I've narrowed it down to one particular ad block which never really earned more than a few dollars a day but was being reported as $50 on some occasions then back down to $2.

It's just too risky to leave it there so I removed it yesterday and replaced it with affiliate ads. I'm also looking at other ad servers to take the place of Adsense.

For the first time ever I have begun to seriously doubt what G is reporting. Diversification has seriously begun and will proceed further for my sites.

I'm glad it's not just me, it is obviously happening to everybody at the moment.November and December 2013 were absolutely fantastic months, I couldn't really do anything wrong. I reckon if I had fallen in the sea I wouldn't have got wet. January earnings were down a little bit, but still good.

Now I'm not saying that earnings are bad, I am definitely a little down on previous month st this stage in February.. However it's the erratic behaviour of AdSense that is doing my head in at the moment. 1 min. Earnings are showing £5. For instance, you go back 20 min later and it's drop back down to £2. Half an hour later it's gone up to £8, 20 min later backed down to £4. It's always done this occasionally, but it's so much worse this month.

Want my advice? (probably not) but i'll give it anyway.

If adsense is taking away 90% of your earnings, it's time to look elsewhere. Places like BuySellAds or Media.net.

Oh and the stats on adsense aren't real time, so they are going to fluctuate. Word on the street is that Google is considering doing away with same day stats for us 'normal' publishers altogether. Take what you see today as a grain of salt.

Nomis5, just saw your post. One piece of advice i'll give you is...don't look at the CPC or earnings on adsense's site. Case in point. At 12:03am this morning one of the sites i managed had a paltry $0.10. each one of these pennies was from a page view. There were no clicks. at 12:15am there were around 500 page views, for around 50 cents. at 12:16am there was a click, which was ACTUALLY worth $1.22. However, adsense reported a CPC of $1.62. Why? Because impressions in adsense count toward the CPC.

WAIT! I'm not done yet! Lets say you do something crazy. Let's say you visit your page 1,000 times in one day. Furthermore lets say your site is displaying CPM ads which give you $1.00 per thousand visits. This means that you notice that your earnings jump by a whole dollar (sick #*$! yo! j/k) just from hitting your site 1,000 times...you are quickly spending that money on amazon...when 15 minutes later you visit the adsense website. GONE! The HELL you say?!?! That dollar was JUST THERE?!?!? What happened? Google's automatic filters operate on a delay, and they hadn't had time to analyze your visit just yet. Once they caught up, they released that you were uh...you and they dropped your visits. Even if you wiped your cookies/cache/everything else Google still has enough info to know it's you, and remove your visits from your earnings.

($1.62 should be $1.72..that's what i get for trying to round off numbers)

"they released" => they realized, sorry folks, mobile phone.

If adsense is taking away 90% of your earnings, it's time to look elsewhere

Yes and no. I've narrowed it down to one ad unit only, the other units are performing OK. The thing is that the rogue ad unit is the smallest earner, by a long way, of the total revenue.

I have removed the ad unit, figures have gone back to normal and I have no idea what was happening on the rogue ad unit.

I don't like it though and as I said earlier, other alternatives are (have now) been implemented. It has spurred me on to look at alternatives for other ad units however. Faulty reporting by G on one ad unit has now infected my thought processes, probably for the better in the long run. Trust is a valuable commodity and my trust in G has been dented severely.

My earnings are slightly down on the last three months, which were pretty fabulous. However, I'd be quite happy if I kept getting what I'm getting at the moment. Not sure why it's changed the way it has, but at least I'm still doing quite well. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the weather gets a little bit warmer.

this has been going on way too long now, im sure google is scraping off the good clicks now, surely i cant be the vistim of click fraud from someone trying to do harm, as google hasnt even bothered to contact me

so, im thinking it is proably Google-certified ad networks !

tonight, i have disable ALL of them, so from now, if i constantly get all these good clicks $$ taken away many times a day, then surley they will then have to look at their own so called google approved blah blah accounts

wow, daily major fluctuations in clicks and earnings even tho i blocked everything for 3rd party ads etc

i now have had only google approved ads since 27th feb

as i look at my account this moment, my earnings are 500% for the day, of course that will round out to my usual daily income :(

what the hell is going on ? i can only see 2 things:

1. i have always had this, but google has recently opened up "hour by hour" stats LIVE

2. click bombing on my specific site ?

cant be #2, as i have seen heaps of posts similar


must be #1 - Google Adsense has a MAJOR problem, so with so many people complaining, wher eis the official notice to us !, the ones that are having there websites click attacked, and what the heck are they going to do about it

mikey

same here.
earning is almost half than it used to be since March.
and Google constantly reduces the number of clicks and my estimated earnings since the end of February.

i've been using Google Adsense for almost 10 years, and I've seen nothing like that.

i think this issue is 3 fold

1. click bombs internet wide - OR
2. something major-wrong with adwords accounts - or
3. my site is awesome, finally ;)

am i narrow minded, is there some other reason ?

my #1 , i suppose this is easy to do for those in the know

my #2 , adwords customers now have the option to BACK TRACK if they didn't realise just how much that keyword would cost them

my #3 , my site has finally been recognized in the SE, and #*$!, adwords customers cant afford those clicks

Ahhhhh, what is going on