Finally! AdSense Offers Publishers Recourse for Click Fraud

The holiday season is again upon us, and for AdSense publishers, Christmas has officially come early this year. We’ve covered the long-standing issue of AdSense bans stemming from invalid activity here on Site-Reference before. It’s been a thorn in the side of webmasters for years now – and after the aggressive algo changes we saw ushered out in 2012, countless AdSense publishers were wiped off the map without so much as a backwards glance.
The problem wasn’t the bans themselves – a decent percentage of them were likely justified. However, a great number of publishers found their accounts disabled with nothing more than a canned email and the sudden appearance of empty ad blocks on the “offending” sites. More often than not, these publishers were victims of “click bombing” – the practice of a competitor, spammer, or troll clicking on a webmaster’s AdSense ads multiple times in an attempt to disable the account.
Click bombing worked. Too well. And there was no clear recourse that webmasters could take to fight back against the bad guys. Webmasters were forced to take it on the chin, and some of them had accounts in good standing for years. It was the height of unfairness – and forums were bursting with accusations that Google AdSense reps sat in their ivory tower, banning accounts without the slightest regard for the little guys.

Well, guess what. Google is seeking to repair that image. Finally. Here’s the official word from a Google rep, as it appeared in a recent Marketing Land article:

Continue reading this article here

Monetize Your Site With AdSense Alternatives

you’ve had AdSense on your site for about 6 months now. Things have been going well. You’ve tweaked your display units a bit, and you’re making about $50 a day – way more than enough to cover hosting and domain costs. Everything is cool,
and then you check your email one morning and see this email, totally out of left field:
“Hello,
After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.
Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.
If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team”

Unfortunately, it’s not an uncommon scenario!
You can always appeal the ban, but don’t hold your breath – there aren’t a whole lot of success stories out there in regards to Google reactivating banned AdSense accounts. If you’re going this route, AdSenseFlippers have put together a helpful list of recommendations for the appeal process.

Why Did This Happen To Me?
What seems to be a pretty common cause for an AdSense ban is when changes are made to a site that break the AdSense TOC (Terms and Conditions).
Some other common reasons for being banned from AdSense are:
* Click fraud (when Google suspects that you’re clicking on your own ads, or asking others to do so) or getting “click bombed.”
* Creating multiple AdSense accounts
* Placing AdSense units on websites with copyrighted or questionable/banned content (porn, warez, drugs, gambling)
* Using link building services such as BuildMyRank
* Displaying more than the allowed number of units on a page
* Tampering with AdSense code

Regardless of the cause, a disabled AdSense account may seem like an absolute disaster for some site owners.

There are a lot of people out there making good money by allowing Google to serve targeted ads on their websites, many of whom are using AdSense exclusively. In the context of this article, we’ll call that “putting all of your eggs in one basket.” It’s always good to have multiple sources of income on your web properties – or, at the very least, have a backup plan.
So have you found yourself banned from using Google AdSense? Fret not, webmaster! You still have your traffic and rankings, and earning these are much more difficult than monetizing said traffic. You just need to find an alternative advertising program that works well for your niche. Here are some more-than-viable alternatives to AdSense to get you back on your feet.
Popular AdSense Alternatives

* Infolinks/Kontera – These are quick and easy inline contextual ad solutions. Certain words in your website copy will be highlighted, and when a user’s cursor goes over the word, an ad is served. When these ads are clicked, revenue is generated for you. These services can work quite nicely for informational /micro niche sites. If you ran a network of micro niche sites, AdSense was probably your best option, but when you’re dealing with a very specific topic like stamp collecting or antique boat restoration, contextual ads could prove to be a nice alternative. If you’re running a WordPress site, check out the WP Kontera plugin.

* Clicksor – Clicksor is another service that offers in-line text ads, but they also have banner ads, pop-unders, and interstitial ads.

* Chitika – Chitika allows you to display targeted, search targeted, mobile and local ads on your site. This can be a good alternative for people with a lot of US and Canadian traffic, but international traffic is more or less ignored.

* Bidvertiser – Bidvertiser offers banners as well as inline ads. This service may work well in larger niches, but I’ve heard that they don’t have a very diverse pool of advertisers, which means that the resulting ads may not be as accurately contextually targeted as what you were displaying with AdSense. Still, it’s worth a shot, especially if you’re in a broad niche.

* AdBrite – AdBrite offers in-line page ads as well as banner and text ads. I have personally used AdBrite with minimal success, but to be fair, I didn’t experiment with it a whole lot.

* Media.net – Media.net offers different sized content ads, “web bar” units, search targeted ads, and mobile ads. They have been known to pay better than AdSense in some niches (apparently health and financial sites work well). If you apply for an account and don’t hear back within a week or so, send them a follow-up email.

* Commission Junction – Affiliate marketing is a whole different ball game, but there’s a lot of money to be made there. I have personally done pretty well with CJ in the past. You have to apply for each affiliate account, and there are loads of them. If you decide to go the affiliate route, there are lots of options available to you, another significant
one being Clickbank.

* eBay Partner Network – You get paid based on the number of clicks that you send from your site to an eBay site. The eBay affiliate program uses a relatively new affiliate payout system called “Quality Click Pricing.” Under this system, the amount paid to affiliates is calculated by an undisclosed algorithm, and therefore it’s not always clear how much you’ll make per click, but people seem to do pretty well with this network.

* Amazon Associates Program – Make money by linking to Amazon products. There’s a wide range of products available, so this could work for many industries, but results will obviously vary from one niche to the next. If you’re running a WordPress blog, you can use the ReviewaZon plugin to add Amazon products to your site. Here’s an example of someone who has had a lot of success with the Amazon Associates Program.
The fact of the matter is that many of these networks simply don’t pay as much as AdSense does. That’s primarily due to the fact that Google has a fantastic variety of advertisers in almost every industry imaginable. So you’ll have to do some experimenting and see which advertisers work best for your particular niche.
AdSense might be the most widely adopted ad program, and there’s a reason why it’s so successful. With AdSense, Google makes it easy for anyone who owns a website to earn some money without having much prior marketing experience. They’ve made it incredibly simple for publishers, and that’s why they can get away with taking a large chunk of the revenue generated by the advertisements.

Diversify Your Income Streams… Or Else!
Again, if you’re running ads on your site(s), it’s probably a good idea to have multiple revenue sources. Using one ad platform as your main source is just asking for trouble, especially when Google is known for closing AdSense accounts without any explanation.
A friend of mine recently received the dreaded “ban hammer” with no explanation, and I definitely feel for him. I have quite a number of small sites generating income primarily via AdSense, and I’d be pretty bummed if I had the rug pulled out from under me all of a sudden.
The moral of the story? Diversify your income streams! Ideally, you’d have multiple projects, and among those projects you’d have multiple methods of monetizing in place. If you’re relying solely on AdSense to monetize your web properties, it’s time to do some experimenting and see what else works for you. Get started today!

WordPress / AdSense Solutions for Multi-Author Blogs

 Making money from blogging is relatively easy. As long as you have content that attracts readers, they will come and a few will click the adverts displayed on your site, or the links to products of interest that you have highlighted.
Running a website single-handed can be tough, which is why more and more startup blogs are bringing in assistance from contributors, found via adverts on sites such as Craigslist. The payment model is usually revenue share, and with a strong promotional strategy this can prove successful. But how is the actual revenue split managed?

An AdSense Plugin for Blogs with Multiple Authors

Totting up the income from advertising every month and then splitting based on the number of views an author’s article has received is clearly going to take a bit of time. The solution, then, is a WordPress plugin that will handle the work for you.
What else should such a plugin do? Ideally, you might expect:

• Ability to add AdSense/affiliate ad code to each writer’s profile.
• Facility to display correct adverts based on author.
• Management of this information in the database.
• Easy attribution of revenue.

Keeping it simple also helps to make things transparent, so if you find your contributors are questioning the amount they’re being paid, they can see how their articles have been performing with regard to views and ad clicks.
Several plugins can be installed which will deliver most or all of these benefits.

Author Advertising Plugin

Available directly from the WordPress Plugins site this is a good option that offers some useful functions. To begin with, you can specify how regular the administrator’s advertising code (AdSense, Amazon, or another) is displayed in relation to those of your contributors.
In addition, the plugin allows adverts to be displayed in two positions on your posts and in two widgets. If the positioning of these isn’t to your liking, the automatic placement can be disabled and a PHP snippet added manually to your template. Unfortunately there is no option for mid-post adverts with this plugin.
Best of all, however, your writers are given their own page into which they post their ad code from AdSense or whichever service. Three slots are given for adverts (as per Google’s “max ads” policy), and these are displayed where specified by the administrator.
All in all a useful plugin that places the issue of revenue split firmly in the hands of the advertising affiliate company by encouraging users to sign up for their own accounts. Best of all, the plugin comes with a manual to help you set everything up correctly.

AdSense Revenue Sharing 1.2

Arguably easier to setup, this plugin also offers the additional advantage of being able to specify the type of adverts that are served, although it is strictly for use with AdSense ads.
Adding multiple AdSense account details is simple, although there is no facility for determining how often ads appear for each user. However there is full control over the AdSense ads, covering format/type and the various CSS details that can be used to style AdSense ad text to your website. You can also specify where on the page the ad should appear.
Like all of these examples, however, the positioning of the adverts might not be to your approval. Sadly this particular example doesn’t offer the facility to add a shortcode or PHP snippet into your posts or templates to specify exactly where the ads should be displayed. With so many different types of WordPress template in use, this is a shortcoming that could be dealbreaker.
Full details are available via the WordPress Plugins site.

Advertwhirl

An extremely feature-packed solution, Advertwhirl is sadly probably over-complicated. While support for multiple bloggers is included in the shape of “guest bloggers” the layout of the pages is garish and the options on offer unclear. Although a tutorial is available, this solution will require a lot of time to get to grips with. Note also that it will one in 20 adverts served will be for the plugin’s developer.
Potentially this is the best option in this list, but without clear presentation and purpose – perhaps a reduction of the menus into a context-driven selection of option – it feels jumbled and confused.
Should you invest the time, the results are sure to be effective – however if you’re short of time and need a “fire and forget” solution to AdSense for multiple bloggers, then Advertwhirl isn’t the solution you’re looking for.
More information and screenshots can be found at the WordPress Plugins library.

Conclusion

While the choice of suitable plugins isn’t as plentiful as that for simply displaying ads across your blog with a single affiliate code, these are nevertheless good options.
Ultimately, of course, your choice should be based on what you hope to gain from these plugins. Many have found that Author Advertising Plugin is the easiest to use to get started straight away, but there might be other options out there that aren’t covered here that offer far more.
What do you think – have you tried any of these plugins, or do you have a preferred option? Let us know in the comments section below!

About Christian

Christian is a professional freelance writer, blogger and website manager with 8 years' experience producing copy, developing content and collaborating with designers.