Adsense Click Bombing
A real threat to Adsense earnings for webmasters is click bombing. Over the past four days I have received emails repeatedly asking what click bombing is and how to track fraudulent clicks.
First of all, what is click bombing? When a bad user (Webmaster who is mad at you because maybe you are too much competition) clicks on your adsense ads a lot of times usually from the same IP address, this results in a large number of clicks being produced in your adsense account. These clicks are considered fraudulent clicks and you may get penalized by Google and they may go as far as banning your adsense account. Why does Google ban your account? The reason your account will be banned is because Google considers your account to be committing click fraud and this is against their Terms Of Service (TOS).You can read more about click fraud in a previous post I wrote.
When click bombing occurs, most webmasters are unaware of what is happening and normally will see a note from Google informing them of their adsense accounts being either locked or banned. As a webmaster, you can avoid your account being banned by first of all reporting suspcious clicks on your account to the Adsense Team. Send them mail with as much information as possible. They will then unlock or restore your account even if you are banned. You can notice unusual clicks on your account when you have a crazy CTR as high as 180% or even 300%. You will also notice a huge amount of clicks, this should raise a red flag and you should contact the Adsense Team immediately. When Google locks your account, they will only unlock it after the click bombing attacks stop so it is better for you to take the ads down and minimize your loses.
What can you do to prevent yourself from being banned if you fall victim? Send a message with details of your account and the abnormal activity to the Adsense Team at the following address, https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact. Install ad and traffic monitoring systems a good one I found which is free is Adlogger. The script enables you to monitor click activity amongst other features. However, if a malicious user decides to take your pub-id then the best is to monitor your account from Adsense. I do both monitor my adsense account and my adlogger account. I do this twice a day so that if I notice anything suspicious, I can report this to Google in time. Remember that a quick response can save your adsense account from being banned. Monitor your adsense account as often as you can, you can never be to sure when you'll be a click bombing target.
Hope this post was of help to you.