How to Track Invalid Clicks in WordPress

Most of the times publishers tend to loose their Adsense Accounts either due to sabotage from rivals or clicking on their own ads.

Clicking on your own ads has no excuse, but what to do if someone sabotages you ??

If guys there at Adsense see about 10–20 invalid clicks in your Adsense account, You will be straight away throw you out of Adsense. And their is very little hope that your your appeal will be considered. So to be on the safer side, you must have your own invalid click tracker.

WordPress Bloggers are lucky because there is a plugin called Adsense Logger which does the job of tracking invalid clicks. Apart from tracking invalid clicks it also:

  • Tracks your Adsense clicks from unlimited domains.
  • Tracks your Adsense impressions from unlimited domains.
  • Tracks Adsense ad background colours.
  • Tracks Adsense ad border colours.
  • Tracks Adsense ad text colours.
  • Tracks Adsense ad link colours.
  • Tracks Adsense ad url colours.
  • Tracks Adsense ad types.
  • Tracks referring servers.
  • Tracks target of Adsense ad clicked.
  • Tracks time of click in both local and Google time.

    • How to Install this plugin ?

      1. Get Adsense Logger
      2. Upload adsenselogger.php and the directory adsenselogger into your plugins directory of your wordpress installation
      3. Chmod count.php and countimp.php to 0644.
      4. Make sure that you Chmod config.php to 0644.
      5. Activate the adsense logger plugin in your plugin administration
      6. Go to adsense logger in the dashboard and enter username and password (if wanted)

    How to Report a Invalid Click ?

    Collect as much data as possible (Date, IP, Time, Page etc) and report it to adsense here

    And you will receive a reply like:

    Hello Your Name,

    Thanks for bringing this information to our attention. We have noted your
    input and will continue to monitor the situation.

    In the future, we may adjust your payment for any days during which
    invalid clicks occurred in order to protect the integrity of the AdSense
    program and properly credit advertisers for any invalid activity. However,
    due to the proprietary nature of our technology we cannot disclose any
    specific details about these clicks.

    We appreciate your understanding in this matter and look forward to your
    continued participation in the program. If you have any questions, please
    feel free to respond to this email.

    For additional questions, we encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
    Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center
    for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on
    the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group
    (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

    Sincerely,

    The Google AdSense Team 

    Note: Adsense Logger Plugin is based on Adsense Logger which is now replaced by Revenue Monitor Script (Paid)

    Please Digg this Article

    This post was published by on June 20, 2006

    About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

    • http://www.wisetome.com Vyoma

      That is a very informative article. I am sure, bloggers who use WordPress and Adsense would find this post very useful.

      I though, have started to use Drupal as the CMS, and I assume, there is a similar module for tracking clicks in Drupal too.

      Regards,
      Vyoma
      http://www.wisetome.com

    • http://www.supriyadisw.net supriyadisw

      Pardon me, how to detect invalid click? Or how to notice the click is invalid click? Thank you for sharing :)

    • http://www.supriyadisw.net supriyadisw

      Pardon me again. I just installed this plugin on my WP. Statistic is work. But I can see earning statistic. Still zero eventhough any click today and I get “404 page not found” when I run: http://www.mysite.net/wp-admin/reports.php?q=clickstoday
      Need help please. Thx before..

    • http://www.blog.tech-buzz.info Thilak

      @Supriyadisw: Checkout this post. It has a better click fraud defense system, It will Disable ads for a visitor who is clicking too many within a certain time period + Get an email alert every time a visitor clicks multiple ads.

    • http://nspeaks.com NSpeaks

      Does not work now since the plugin which depends on a script was not updated. Script does not exist. Adlogger was shut down.

      So only option is http://clickaider.com/

    • http://adsdefender.com adsdefender

      Guys, please try out newly launched Adsense click fraud protection system. It’s a defense system against invalid click with some tracking features.

      http://test.adsdefender.com/