Forum Moderators: martinibuster

Message Too Old, No Replies

Clicks from Direct visits

I have clicks on Ads from direct visitors

         

Tech4

9:17 am on Jul 23, 2019 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



Hi everyone!
Some time ago I asked a question about disappeared ads here. Google said that invalid traffic is likely to be the reason. That's why I investigated the users behavior on my website. And there's one thing that bothers me.

Google Analytics shows that I have a lot of clicks on certain pages from a direct visitors. I believe, this is not normal. In this example you can see that I have 100 clicks from direct visitors during the last 24 hours. (I wanted to add screenshots but don't know how to do it the better way)
Source/Medium = direct/(none)
Publishers Impressions = 1909
Clicks = 100
Publisher Revenue = $2.90


Another thing I see is that Google often counts clicks but doesn't pay me money. I can presume that all those clicks were from the same IP and Google algorithms decided that was invalid activity (fraud). Here is another example:


Publishers Impressions = 3
Clicks = 14
Publisher Revenue = <$0.01


I see that such weird behavior takes place on the same pages every day. I mean, there are certain pages where it happens far more often then on others.

I know that all this has been discussed millions of times, that users can click on an advertisement as many times as they want and this is out of our control, but could you please write your opinion behind this issue.

My questions:
1. May GA display visits from some other search engine (for instance, Chinese) as direct visits or these are REALLY direct visits with 100% probability?
2. Should I be concerned about it or just relax and let Google algorithms decide when to pay me money for clicks and when to cancel if considered as invalid?
3. What to do? Maybe I should disable ads on those web pages where I have such clicks because it can do more harm than profit...

Dimitri

10:41 am on Jul 23, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Direct visits, "might" also be from search engines or other sites too, you know, (I hope I am not wrong), a direct visit = no referrer . So nowadays, we more and more privacy protection thingy, some browsers are no longer sending referrals. So "among them", an "unknown" given number of visit might not be direct, but from another site/SE.

Now, what you describe might sounds like bot activity, or some kind of scrappers which might be silly following ads in their grabbing fever.

I would assume that Adsense can / should detect this on its own, even before displaying ads, and therefor shouldn't count clicks. But this remains obscure to me.

What I do at my site is that, I am proactively block suspect visits, I am certainly blocking legitimate visitors too. By suspect visit , I mean, I maintain a list of bad IPs, I also track wrong UA, as well as malformed or incomplete header fields.

Mark_A

8:11 am on Jul 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I have a number of visitors that fall into the "direct" category.

In fact that category is declining since about April / May, and bringing overall traffic averages down also.

tangor

8:54 am on Jul 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



As the web grows in size, so do the number of bots.

These days I calculate that <10% of my site visits are HUMAN.

YMMV

G, meanwhile, will ding (and reduce) any income from these bad actors.