How to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account

This article describes a way to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account.

I noticed a link to an Invalid Clicks Contact form in a recent blog-post from Google.

You can find the form here.

Basically, this is a way to tell Google if you think that something has gone wrong with your AdSense account, for example if you are being click-bombed or similarly targeted by malicious people or activity.

This caught my attention because exactly that happened recently here on Blogger-hints-and-tops: from reading the AdSense help forums, it seems that bots (or something) were attacking Link Units, and suddenly lots of people were getting huge increases in both click-through rates and revenue-per-click. At the time, I followed the advice given there:

Remove the Link Units,
Remove the site from the approved list
Post a "me too" message on the support forum thread,
Wait for Google to act against the bad guys.

But it still felt wrong not to take a more active step to tell Google about the specific problem with my account.

What does the form do

The Invalid Clicks report form has fields that let you give

Your name, email address and AdSense publisher ID
The URL where ad code appears
Topic (select one of: reporting unusual activity, or predicting a significant change in account activity)
A paragraph describing what led you to believe that the click activity was invalid

"Data from your site, mobile app and/or YouTube channel traffic logs or reports that indicate suspicious IP addresses, referrers or requests which could explain invalid activity."

Note that you only have 1000 characters for the description - but I'm sure that links to documents in your Google Drive (set to be avaialble to anyone with the link, of course) would be very acceptable.

They do say

"Please note that we may not respond to your message unless we find a significant issue with your account."

and I would not be in the least surprised to not hear anything back.

Mention expected traffic increases, too

Sometimes, you may know that your blog is likely to get a a large traffic increase. For example, you may publish a controversial post, or release a resource which is extensively publicised via social media or your email list.

You can also use this form to tell Google AdSense about this, and that you expect a sudden increase in page impressions and revenue.

There are no guarantees, of course, but this may help them to distinguish between genuine and invalid sudden changesincreases, in cases where these are manually reviewed.

When not to use the form

Google know that even the most careful publisher will occasionally click on an ad themselves, especially on sites which are about personal hobbies or interests.

My guess is that we should not waste time reporting these invidiual clicks. They are very easy for Google to identify and disqualify - and doing to would make it a lot harder form them to identify real problems vs noise from issues reported via the form.