Is your AdSense account in danger?

Get to know your AdSense numbers.

Most bloggers don’t pay attention to their numbers. The only factor they pay attention to is how much money they have earned. Paying attention to only the money you have made is a colossal mistake! You need to be paying attention to the underlying numbers as well. Not only are they essential to help you understand your traffic to help you make more money. They are also crucial in helping you keep your AdSense account out of danger from either suspension or termination.

Invalid Traffic

The first number you need to be looking at to tell if your AdSense account is in danger is your invalid traffic. “Invalid traffic includes any clicks or impressions that may inflate an advertiser’s costs or earnings.” Invalid traffic covers fraudulent traffic as well as accidental clicks.” Every month you need to be keeping an eye on how much Invalid Traffic your site generates. If you are creating a large number of invalid traffic compared to your valid traffic earnings. Your AdSense account may be in danger of either getting banned or suspended.

Now to be clear, every site generates invalid traffic. There is always going to be some invalid traffic, no matter what you do — covering people who are inadvertently clicking ads to random bots crawling your sites. You’re going to get some. However, if you earned $100 in a month and a large portion of that is from invalid traffic. That is a problem! You’re going to want to address it before it’s too late.

I would love to tell you what percentage of invalid traffic to valid traffic you should be comfortable having. However, Google does not release such numbers. They feel that it would be giving those looking to cheat the system guidance on how to do so. The only thing you can do is keep a close eye on it. A large number of invalid traffic compared to your valid traffic is not a good thing. You should disable your account temporarily. Until you can find out what the problem is and where your invalid traffic is originating.

Invalid traffic is located underpayments in your Google AdSense account and calculated on a per month basis.

AdSense CTR (Click Through Rate)

The next thing bloggers and website owners should be paying close attention to is their CTR. CTR stands for click-through rate. If an ad is shown 100 times on your site and only one person clicks on the advertisement. Your CTR would be one percent. It would be best if you protect yourself from having a high CTR rate.

Ads based on my research in general across the broad spectrum have a 2 to 3 CTR rate on average. So your website CTR should be following along those same lines. For example, the image below is the CTR rate for the last three months for Bloggers Traffic Community.

As you can see, the last three months Bloggers Traffic Community CTR is 1.02%, which is down .57 percent from the previous first three months.

Furthermore, you can view a more detailed report by clicking on Reports on the left side Panel when logged into AdSense. You can look at CTR for your ad units, by country, URL, and so much more.  Knowing these stats helps you immensely to help you understand if  Is your Adsense account in danger.

How to Access Your Detailed CTR Stats

To see your lifetime CTR for individual sites or sites.

1.Log into your AdSense Account

2.Select Reports from the side panel

3.Select the date range in the upper right panel

4.Select sites under All Reports in the left panel

5. Click on the Tab Clicks

If you wanted a complete breakdown by the country, you would follow the same steps but instead of selecting sites in step two. You would alternatively select countries.

There a wealth of information contained your AdSense account analytics that can help you in other ways besides keeping track of your CTR. Nothing is, however, more important than guarding against abnormally high CTR. High CTR is a major red flag that something is amiss with your site. It can and will lead to your site getting banned.

How does abnormally High CTR happen?

High CTR can happen for a lot of reasons, but here is a brief rundown.

1. The website owner is openly (against AdSense Policy) and is actively asking for others to click the ads on their site.

2. The website owner is trying to drive traffic to their website by using services that claim to be AdSense safe. (Hint: None of them are)

3. Malicious behavior from coming from outsides forces. Some bots and scripts target AdSense accounts.

Three is most scary for AdSense users because it’s out of your control. However, if you keep track of these two numbers, you should be able to stop it and catch it before you get banned. Even if that means Temporarily shutting down your AdSense account until you can sort the problem out.

AdSense in Danger Conclusion 

While nobody knows all the ways on how to keep from getting your AdSense account banned, only Google knows that, and they are not sharing. However, having High Invalid Traffic and High CTR rate are undoubtedly the most common ways that your AdSense account is in danger of getting banned. Knowing and keeping track of these numbers will significantly reduce the chance of this happening.

Any questions, please come and join us in the community. We have lots of people who know this stuff backward and forwards. They will help you understand as well.

Thanks for reading and happy blogging