While we have strong systems in place to detect invalid activity, it's equally important that all publishers regularly review their traffic and ad implementations. If you're an AdSense publisher, we encourage you to read our beginner's guide to AdSense policies, as well as follow our program policies, and Terms and Conditions. If you're a Google Ad Manager publisher, we encourage you to read the Ad Manager Program Policies, including the Platforms program policies and Google Publisher Policies.

Please make sure that you comply with the Coalition for Better Ads’ Better Ads Standards. You can check the Ad Experience Report if you believe your ad serving has been blocked for violating the Better Ads Standards.

Finally, we encourage you to report any suspicious activity on your site or app with the Invalid Clicks Contact Form.

Best practices to prevent invalid activity

• Understand your traffic and site visitors by breaking down your traffic reports into meaningful segments or channels.
• Don't click your own ads, even if you're interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL. Instead, use the Google Publisher Toolbar, as described below.
• Additional guidance for AdSense Publishers:
• Be very careful when purchasing traffic and review the traffic provider checklist to help guide your discussions with potential providers. The checklist suggests questions to ask as you get to know the traffic provider. Their answers should help you understand exactly what type of traffic you'll get, so you can avoid buying from untrustworthy or low-quality providers.
• Double-check your ad implementations, then check them again. Make sure they are free from programming errors, conform to AdSense policies, and interact properly with different browsers and platforms. A well-implemented page can protect you from unintended consequences like accidental clicks. Encouraging accidental clicks is strictly prohibited, as outlined in our ad placement policies.
• Use the authorized sites feature to prevent unauthorized use of your ad code.
• If you find a traffic source that seems suspicious, you can block that IP address or referral URL. You can also limit the types of ads that can appear on your site using blocking controls by categories, advertiser URLs or blocking ads via the Ad Review Center.
• You can use the following AdSense features to view up-to-date information about your account, better understand performance metrics, and take action if you see problem ads.
• Homepage reports to view your earnings information
• The Ad review center to block or report problem ads
• Homepage cards to view your Google Analytics data
• Additional guidance for Google Ad Manager publishers:
• Review our guidelines for purchasing traffic to your site to better understand the implications of sourcing traffic from third parties. You should also review the traffic provider checklist to help guide discussions with potential providers.
• Familiarize yourself with our safeguards against invalid clicks and impressions, as well as our invalid traffic detection and filtration methodology.
• Ad Manager provides several features to help you better understand your traffic and to troubleshoot issues.
• Ad Manager report metrics to learn about which metrics display the information you may need
• Segmenting traffic to better understand it.
• Resolve issues in the Web policy center and App policy center

Google treats invalid traffic very seriously, analyzing all clicks and impressions to determine whether they fit a pattern of abuse that might artificially drive up a publisher's earnings. Google is committed to protecting both advertisers and publishers from invalid traffic. If we determine that a publisher account might pose a risk to our advertisers, we may disable that account to protect our advertisers' interests.

Due to the policies we've implemented to protect the privacy of our users and the proprietary nature of our algorithms, we're unable to provide publishers with any information about the source or timing of invalid clicks, their account activity, including any pages, users, or third-party services that might have been involved. For the security of our advertisers, we also want to be sure that these details can't be used by someone wishing to evade detection in the future.

If your account is disabled due to invalid traffic, we will withhold all unpaid revenue. Where appropriate and possible, we will credit that unpaid revenue, including all of Google's share, to any affected advertisers.

If you feel that this decision of your account being disabled for invalid traffic was made in error, and if you can maintain in good faith that the invalid traffic was not due to the actions or negligence of you or those for whom you are responsible, you may appeal through our Google AdMob, AdSense, or Ad Manager appeal forms.

Please note that an appeal does not guarantee reinstatement. Once we've reached a decision on an appeal, we consider it to be final and will not accept any further appeals.

To learn more about why accounts may be disabled, please visit our Help Center article Top reasons for account closure and the Disabled accounts FAQ page.

Here are some tips that you might find useful when writing your appeal:

• Review the common reasons accounts are disabled for invalid traffic for Google AdMob, AdSense, or Ad Manager. Do any of these reasons apply to you or your content? Did your friends click on your ads too many times? Did you purchase traffic that led to a surge of invalid traffic? Can you make content and/or behavioral changes to prevent the invalid traffic from happening again?
• Review the ad implementations on your desktop site, mobile site, and/or mobile app. Think about what your typical user journey would be, and see if the ad implementations might cause users to accidentally click on your ads.
• In the appeal form, provide the email address that's associated with your disabled account. This will help us locate your account and reduce delays in processing your appeal.
• Tell us what changes you’ll make for the future. What systems or behaviors have you put in place to ensure this won't happen again? For example, tell us how you've adjusted your ad implementations, evaluated your traffic sources, etc.

As a publisher, it's important to understand the drivers and sources of traffic to your website. In extreme cases, an egregious traffic source that generates invalid clicks on your ads may lead to your account being disabled. Suspicious traffic may violate various AdSense program policies or Google Ad Manager policies for invalid activity and/or traffic sources, such as:

• Usage of automated bots that imitate user behavior
• Buying unrelated traffic from unknown networks
• Participating in pay-to-click programs
• Receiving traffic from unwanted email or software applications

Some publishers have asked for information about known sources of invalid traffic. Unfortunately, many of these sources frequently change their tactics, and in order to protect the effectiveness of our detection systems, we are unable to provide information about them. This is one reason why understanding your own traffic is important. Proactive identification of the quality of your traffic sources is a fast and effective way to protect your account from invalid activity.

Whether you're using a supply-side platform or are configuring your own ads, make sure your ads are set up correctly by watching out for alerts on rejected ad requests on AdSense or rejected ad requests on Google Ad Manager. These alerts indicate a risk of lower relevancy for your ads and the possibility that these ads may not even show up.

Your responsibilities as a Google Ad Manager publisher

While we have strong systems in place to detect invalid activity, you are ultimately responsible for regularly reviewing your traffic and the ad implementations on your site. It's also important to maintain compliance with Google Ad Manager Partner Guidelines.

Make sure your ads comply with Google Ad Manager Partner Guidelines and Platform Program Policies. These policies include details on things like ad placement, content, advertising, privacy and invalid activity.

Whether you use a supply-side platform or configure your own ads, make sure they're set up correctly by watching out for alerts on rejected ad requests. These alerts indicate a risk of lower relevancy for your ads and the possibility that these ads may not be showing.

As a publisher, there are several best practices to better understand the traffic to your websites. In this section, we'll discuss how Google's Search Console Tools can give you insight into that traffic.

Google Search Console Tools

Some of the best strategies for driving visitors to your websites and improving the visibility of your pages can be found in Google's Search Console Tools. These tools allow you to submit all your pages to the Google index, then view the common words that link to your pages and in turn are recognized by Google.

Google Search Console Tools also let you see trends in your site content, which can help you work out your ranking for particular keywords. You can also see which page has the highest pagerank by month. This information can help you decide how to best prioritize your time when optimizing ads on your site.

Google Search Console Tools also show you which Google searches create click-throughs to your site and where you're positioned in the search results for that query. You can even segment your traffic and view data for individual properties and countries - for instance, which user queries from Google Images searches in the United States returned your site in the results.

Site analytics programs, such as Google Analytics, can help you track and review traffic on your sites. These programs show you what type of visitors are viewing your pages, what they do on your site, and if they are engaging with your ads and content.

Segmenting your traffic allows you to set up your ad units and custom channels in such a way that you can see all your traffic sources clearly and monitor how each one performs. Whether you're new to AdSense or a long-time publisher, these insights can be very useful. Custom channels let you track the performance of specific groups of ad units in AdSense.

Granular traffic segmentation will also allow you to identify your traffic sources at any given time and see how they perform relative to one another. With this data, you can find out how people are reaching your site and whether you can optimize your traffic sources. You can also integrate your AdSense account with Analytics or link your Google Ad Manager and Google Analytics accounts to get more insight into how to tailor your content and ads to your site's users.

Moreover, segmenting your traffic can help you identify potential invalid activity more quickly, and help you make appropriate changes to keep your account in good order. Proactively monitoring the performance of your traffic sources lets you make informed decisions and spot potential sources of bad traffic. Be on the lookout for any suspicious user behavior. Ask questions like, "Where do my users come from, geographically and on the web? Which pages do they view on my site?"

We encourage all publishers to look for anomalies in their data, monitor the strength of their traffic sources, and understand how to remain compliant with program policies.

To learn more about how to set up channels, check out this Help Center article for AdSense and this Help Center article for Google Ad Manager.

There are two main ways to increase traffic by optimizing your site: web enhancements and new traffic acquisition.

Web enhancements

Web enhancements such as optimizing ad placement and navigation can have a big effect on your traffic. Check out our Help Center article to learn how fast-loading pages, relevant content, and effective mobile sites can help increase traffic to your website.

It's important to remember the AdSense program policies, Google Ad Manager program policies, and Google's Webmaster Guidelines, when making changes to your site. For example, Google ads, search boxes, and search results may not be:

• Integrated into a software application of any kind, including toolbars (does not apply to AdMob)
• Displayed in pop-ups or pop-unders
• Placed in emails, email programs, or chat programs
• Obscured by elements on a page
• Placed on any non-content-based page (does not apply to AdSense for search or mobile AdSense for search)
• Placed on pages published specifically to show ads
• Placed on pages whose content or URL could confuse users into thinking it's associated with Google due to the misuse of logos, trademarks or other brand features
• Placed on, within, or alongside other Google products or services in a manner that violates the policies of that product or service

For a complete list of policies, consult the AdSense program policies (and AdSense Terms and Conditions) or the Google Ad Manager program policies.

Ultimately, in order to promote and ensure a good experience for users and advertisers, clicks on Google ads must result from genuine visitor interest.

New traffic acquisition

Search engine optimization, advertising, and partnering with traffic providers are more good ways to generate more visits to your website.

Search engine optimization

Make sure your SEO is clean and adheres to Google policy by reading our Webmaster Guidelines, also referenced in the "Web enhancements" section. These best practices help create a site that Google can find, crawl, index, and understand.

For a more in-depth guide to SEO, please read our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. In addition, as mentioned in the Understanding traffic on your site section below, Google Search Console Tools enable you to submit all of your pages to the Google index, which can increase your visibility by optimizing your website for Google search.

If you decide you to work with a search engine optimizer, we suggest the following:

• Ask for recommendations from webmasters you personally know and trust, or search for well-known optimizers with good reputations on the web. If possible, read what others have written about them in forums before working with them.
• If you choose an optimizer based on their reputation on the web, ask for examples of sites they have optimized. The sites should be as similar to yours as possible based on your content vertical, demographics, number of visits/month, and so on.
• Make sure that the SEO won't cause your site to contravene the Webmaster Guidelines, for example by purchasing links in order to increase your PageRank.

Check out this Search Engine Optimization help article for more helpful tips and things to consider.

Advertising

You're welcome to use online advertising as a way to direct new users to your website, but if they link to pages with Google ads, they are required to comply with the spirit of our landing page quality guidelines.

The three main components of a high-quality landing page are relevant and original content, transparency, and site navigability. Please read the use of online advertising article in our Help Center to learn more about each of these components.

We also prohibit the following techniques:

• spam emails
• comment spamming
• fake forum profiles
• posting links on link farms and 'private blog networks', link exchanges and social network spamming.

You're welcome to promote your website in any manner that complies with our program policies. While traffic exchange services aren't strictly prohibited, some exchange services may lead to invalid clicks or impressions. Publishers are ultimately responsible for the traffic to their ads. So if you choose to partner with a third-party service to increase traffic to your site, it's critical that you monitor your reports closely to gauge the impact of each source on your ad traffic. If you start noticing suspicious activity, we recommend that you stop using these services to keep your account in good order.

There are many services that promise to increase traffic to your site, including pay-per-click solutions to connect advertisers and publishers, as well as search engines and directory sites. However, we've found that some of these services send artificial traffic to websites, despite their reputable appearances. To deliver the traffic levels that their customers expect, these services sometimes generate clicks and impressions using clickbots or by providing users incentives to visit sites and click on ads.

For more information on how to avoid partnering with low-quality traffic providers, please refer to Proactive steps to prevent invalid activity section of this page. Specifically, the traffic provider checklist provides suggested questions to ask when you begin exploring how you and the traffic provider might work together. If you decide to go ahead, it's critical that you have the ability to monitor the traffic they send to your site.

The reports in your account are intended to give you a close estimate of the current activity on your account. However, many factors can affect the amount that is ultimately paid to you.

Once earnings are finalized, they are posted to your Payments page. Any revenue discovered to be from invalid clicks or impressions is credited back to the affected advertisers where possible. If your account is disabled for invalid activity, all revenue in the account will be credited to advertisers where possible and appropriate and you will not be eligible to receive payment.

On your account homepage you can find the following information:

• Estimated earnings. Close estimates of your recent account activity from today, yesterday, this month so far, and last month.
• Finalized earnings. This section displays two levels of earnings:
• Current balance of your earnings that have not yet been paid out. This may not reflect the total amount of payment you receive. Google may make adjustments to the amount, including rounding discrepancies, invalid activity that needs to be adjusted from your earnings, or other month-end credits as necessary.
• Most recent payment that you've received from Google.

We may make adjustments to your estimated or finalized earnings to account for invalid impressions or clicks, which means we may remove earnings from your payable balance. However, in most cases, estimated earnings exclude the majority of detected invalid traffic. Our real-time filters assess impressions and clicks as they occur, and if they are found to be invalid, advertisers are not charged and no revenue is generated.

This unearned revenue doesn't always show up in front-end reports in real time, but is sometimes updated at the end of the month instead, as such, estimated earnings may not match finalized earnings. This is not so much "removed" revenue as revenue that was never earned by either the publisher or Google, since the advertisers were never charged for the traffic.

To prevent invalid activity on your account, make sure to investigate any changes in traffic sources that you've experienced over the last payment cycle. We recommend taking a close look at all referral sites found in your web analytics reports and/or your site's web log history.

Investigate any unusual increase in a particular traffic source from another country, website, or IP address that matches the time period in which your finalized earnings differed from your estimated earnings. Once you've identified a suspicious traffic source, you can block that IP address or referral URL. We also highly recommend closely monitoring any website optimizers you're working with.

For more information about estimated earnings and how we deduct earnings due to invalid traffic, please see our help center articles for AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager.

Standard web crawlers are a normal part of Internet traffic. Our signals and filters can tell the difference between simple web crawlers and malicious botnets, so we won't penalize you if we detect one. However, since we don't charge advertisers for these non-human impressions and clicks, you also won't generate revenue from this traffic.

Tips for Multi Customer Management

Scaled Partner Management is a unique feature of Google Ad Manager. If you're new to Scaled Partner Management, the best practices guide in the Ad Manager help center offers recommendations for linking and setting up new accounts. You should also review the Google Ad Manager Partner Guidelines to better understand our policies with regard to Scaled Partner Management.

Authorized Digital Sellers, or ads.txt (and app-ads.txt) is an IAB Tech Lab initiative that helps ensure that your digital ad inventory is only sold through sellers who you've identified as authorized. Creating your own ads.txt or app-ads.txt files gives you more control over who's allowed to sell ads on your site or app and helps prevent counterfeit inventory from being presented to advertisers.

We recommend that you use an ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. They can help buyers identify counterfeit inventory and help you receive more advertiser spend that might have otherwise gone toward that counterfeit inventory.

Note that you can only have one Google AdSense, AdMob or Ad Manager account per payee name.