Why do I have invalid traffic deductions in my AdSense account?

[zareen]

Hi
AdSense Publishers, my name is Brandon and I work with the AdSense team.
A common question we get from a lot of our publishers is why do I have invalid activity deductions on my account?

So what is invalid activity?
Invalid activity includes clicks and impressions that occur artificially through your site.
These come in the form of page views that are generated from bots or other artificial means to boost your page view numbers or clicks.
Most commonly through accidental clicks from poor ad implementation.
So what can you do to prevent these sort of accidental clicks and other invalid situations from occurring?
I’m going to over 3 very common tactics to help deal with it.
The first one is understanding your sites traffic.
This can be done on a high level just by looking at where your traffic is coming from, what counties, what URLs, what sources.
But you can also dig deeper using Google Analytics.
And something that you can look further into on your own.
The other important part of understanding your traffic is knowing who you work with, especially in terms of promoting and marketing your site.
If you’re dealing with low quality third parties for promotion and marketing you may be dealing with a partner who’s using artificial tactics of boosting your metrics.
This can mean, them posting on certain forums, community forums or social threads that are derived for the sole purpose of pushing people to that URL to boost your metrics.
And this kind of artificial inflation is something you want to avoid and it doesn’t create an organic situation and organic interaction with your content.
Which is what you want to have success on AdSense.
So understanding where your URLs are being posted, what kind of communities engage with your content, it’s very very crucial to understanding invalid activity.
The next thing I want to talk about, is in terms of ad implementation.
Ad implementation is very very important for decreasing accidental clicks because the way your ads are placed on the page can cause certain scenarios where your users would accidentally
click on the ad content.
On mobile this is very very important because the screen is small and users are engaging with the content directly.
So if you’re not leaving adequate white space or other space between the content, users can accidentally scroll over an ad and click on it causing an accidental click situation.
On desktop similarly, if your ads blend in too much to the content or if there isn’t adequate spacing and labeling that says it’s an advertisement, user may accidentally click on it thinking it’s a part of the content or because they couldn’t get around the finding the content.
These are very common situations for you to be aware of.
You should take a close look at your site and make sure that you are labeling and providing spacing to avoid this situation.
Third thing you can do is site authorization.
If other people are using your ad source code by just putting inspect on your page and then using any code from your site, that can cause your ad code to show up on other peoples sites that you don’t own.
If these sites do have poor ad implementation it can cause invalid activity there or other accidental clicks.
So to prevent yourself from getting in trouble with accidental clicks and other invalid activity for ad code that’s not on your site, you want to turn on site authorization.
And you can go to our help center to learn exactly how to do that.
That will make sure that you’re only responsible for the ad code that’s on your site.
Those are the three things, I hope you’ve found it helpful and thanks for watching.