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How you can help to prevent invalid activity

As you may know, AdSense publishers are ultimately responsible for the traffic on their ads. For this reason, it’s critical that you diligently monitor your ad traffic to ensure that your account is compliant with our policies and not accruing invalid activity. If you see something suspicious after following the tips below, you’re welcome to notify us.

We encourage you to review the information in our beginner’s guide to AdSense policies, as well as our full program policies and Terms and Conditions. In addition to that, here are some tips to help you prevent invalid activity on your ads:

• Understand your ad traffic and site visitors

  Break down your traffic reports into meaningful segments using URL channels, custom channels, or even DFP ad units. This will help you gauge how changes to traffic sources or implementation can affect your ad traffic.

  Next, use Google Analytics to get detailed information about your site visitors, and be on the lookout for any suspicious user behavior. (Where do my users come from, either geographically or on the Web? Which pages do they view on my site?). Learn more about how you can understand your traffic.

• Avoid partnering with untrusted / low-quality parties

  Some publishers have had issues with invalid activity when partnering with low-quality ad networks, search engines, or directory sites in efforts to increase traffic to their site. Learn more about traffic.

• Don’t click on your own ads, even if you think it’s okay to do so

  Even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL, clicking on your own ads is still prohibited. Instead, please use the AdSense publisher toolbar. Please keep in mind that even when we filter clicks on your own ads, we don't ignore those clicks completely; if it appears to us that a publisher has been clicking on his own ads to inflate his earnings or an advertiser's costs, we may disable the account to protect our advertisers.

• Double- and triple-check your implementation

  Some publishers use custom implementations that may have unintended consequences on their ad requests. Make sure your ad implementation has no programming errors, make sure it conforms to our ad placement policies, and test interaction with the ads in different browsers and platforms to ensure that all users will interact with them as you expect.

• Use the authorized sites feature to prevent unauthorized use of your ad code.

  Our authorized sites feature ensures that your account will only accrue stats for your ads that appear on sites that you’ve specified. That said, make sure that you’ve added your sites correctly, otherwise our system may filter traffic that you’d prefer to retain.

• Consult the AdSense Help Forum.

  If you have a question, it’s likely that another publisher has encountered the same issue, so join in a discussion to learn more, or start your own. Let others know if you’ve encountered a third party or situation that tends to generate invalid activity.