Are you a Google AdSense publisher? Do you worry about accidentally clicking on your own ads and being thrown out of the program? I have a solution for you.
Today I’ve released a Greasemonkey script for Firefox which prevents you from clicking on your own Google AdSense ads. The script prevents clicks on both ad units and link units. You can still click on others’ AdSense ads, however.
The script requires that you be running Firefox as well as the Greasemonkey extension. Note that it has only been tested with Greasemonkey 0.5 and I cannot guarantee that it will work on previous versions. If not, the script will warn you that your version of Greasemonkey is too old, and will not prevent any clicks.
Shortly after you install it, it will ask you to enter your AdSense publisher ID. This is the pub-**************** number from your AdSense code and is used to determine which ads to prevent accidental clicks from.
Once you have Firefox and Greasemonkey, download the script.
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Aug 04, 2005
Weblog Tools Collection » Prevent accidental clicks on your own AdSense
Aug 04, 2005
WiRED.Pod » Blog Archive » Preventing Accidental Clicks On Your AdSense
N. Mallory
Aug 04, 2005
What I find frustrating is when I see an ad I’d actually like to follow but it’s on my own site. grrrrr
Michael Hampton
Aug 04, 2005
That’s pretty easy to deal with. Right-click the ad, copy the link location, paste it into a text editor, strip out all the Google stuff and you’ll find the actual URL somewhere in the middle of it. Then paste in just that URL yourself.
Mark J
Aug 04, 2005
Nicely done!
Next step, if you’re feeling generous, don’t disable the links, convert them to their naked URIs (i.e. strip out all the Google stuff). That way, you can click on your own ads, as N. Mallory would like, but you don’t have to worry about getting banned from the program.
Aug 04, 2005
netadblog » Blog Archive » Evitando clicks en el Adsense Propio : Mercadotecnia, marketing y medios
Aug 05, 2005
16-bits » Blog Archive »
Aug 05, 2005
Mis clicks en el Adsense
Aug 06, 2005
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Aug 06, 2005
Acme Technologies Zeitgeist » Prevent accidental AdSense Clicks
Aug 08, 2005
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Blaine Moore
Aug 08, 2005
I agree with Mark J, that would be a very handy update to this great tool.
Michael Hampton
Aug 08, 2005
Heh, I’ll put that on the to-do list. :)
Tracy Norman
Sep 06, 2005
TRACY NORMAN’S RECOMMENDATIONS :
BY BANNING INNOCENT PUBLISHERS AND THROWING THEM OUT OF GOOGLE ADSENSE, GOOGLE IS ACTUALLY RUINING ITS OWN PRECIOUS TRUST FACTOR. ISN’T GOOGLE BEHAVING LIKE A MONSTER. A SEMI-LORD THAT CAN PLAY WITH ANYONE’S FATE?
I have a client that has a decent click tracking facility for their affiliate system. Can’t google make things more transparent for everyone which is truly justifable and necessity and call of the hour.
Google also says they filter out fraudulent clicks automatically. Then how come they can take away all your hand earned money and pay you nothing? Is Google ending up as the biggest blunder on the worldwide scale playing with advertisers as well as with publishers?
Does google EVER PAYBACK AN ADVERTISER HIS/HER MONEY THAT WAS CHARGED FOR FRAUDULENT CLICKS ?
Isn’t google turning up to be an evil just for the sake of robbing month from millions of people on both the sides every day!?
I wish you people should go for other good networks such as Yahoo/Overture and others. I’m sure only the one that will offer complete transparency in terms of traffic stats to the publishers as well as to the advertisers will survive at last. And until that, companies such as google would loose their precious trust that they’ve build with excellent performance in the pasts!
You can fool a few people for some time, but you can not fool large number of people for a long time.
Google might be happy to take away small money of thousands of people and thus powering up their balance sheets, but what they don’t know is that ONCE A WAVE STARTS WHERE PEOPLE STOP SUPPORTING THEM WITH ADSENSE AND MOVE TO OTHER PARTNER IN BUNCH, THEN THEY’LL HAVE ALL THEIR ADVERTISERS TURNING BACK TO THEM AND A BUNCH OF LAWSUITS BEING THROWN ON THEM!
IS GOOGLE LISTENING? YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO ?
IS MSN LISTENING? I hope you people get back the heart of the world by offering a more transparent contextual advertising option such as MicroSense!
Is Yahoo Listening? Best of luck for your new venture. But remember that the world keeps good hopes with you people and hope you won’t end up as another cheater!
It’s the moral responsibility of the market leaders to protect, enhance and boost everyone’s morale and trust by providing true opportunities an options, not playing with other people’s money or hard efforts.
“You’re actually blessed to have the trust of millions. You think you did it yourself? Wasn’t there the will of the almighty and your fate? You think you’re God? You think you can take away money of trueful people in this way and change their destiny? I’ve seen thousands of people keeping trust in you and start blogging for you so that YOU MAKE GOOD MONEY and throw a bit of it for them. Don’t you have a moral responsibility to pay them back in the form of your commitment for true judgement in the form of indentifying the real CULPRIT, the real cause of chaos for whose actions, you blindly punish the poor site owner dedicatedly working for you investing their huge life-time, money and energy for composing fantastic content so that YOU end up profitting ?”
The solution :
1. Give users an option to deliver adsense through server side scripting, such as asp, jsp, cf or php and provide them true legitimate option to track all adsense clickthroughs outgoing from their site.
Mind you, though bad people are always everywhere, you should take care that you do not punish the true good one, or else you earn up a curse. Do you want to earn money by earning curses from people devoting their lifetime and carrier for YOU people? Have you ever told them how much YOU made from that click while paying them a bit? These good people don’t even ask for that. They just wish GOOD to happen to YOU as well as to themselves. Its your moral responsibility to safeguard them, or else I can foresee that within 6 months you should be ready to loose a lot of business to your new upcomig competitors and that’s how the world goes!
So better understand it on time or get ready for a change! With internet, implementing a change is no big deal. Anyone hires a marketer with the thoughts of revenge and promotes your competitors just to take you down while earning up some real nice money from your competitors as leads based affiliate program!
In lesser words, pay back the money you’ve wrongly acquired from thousands of individuals. Say a Gentleman’s “THANK YOU” to them for their support, and then close their account if you want. And then reinvite them with a more sound tracking facility so that all clicks are perfectly tracked!
YOU WANT ME TO GIVE YOU A SOLUTION? OK HERE IT GOES. “Implement something similar to STOP-LOSS order system as in case of stock trading.
Allow adsense publishers to adapt NULLIFY ALL CLICKS ORIGINATING FROM A SPECIFIC COMPUTER IF 4+ CLICKS OCCUR FROM THE SAME REMOTE_ADDR AND HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR in less than 15 seconds. This is something that doesn’t happen generally. Just nullify these clicks! That’s it. How come you can just BAN tha site owner for any mischief done by any site visitor from anywhere in the whole world! Is this the reward that you actually give to your dedicated partners,, your non-contracted team of supports that’s working more devotedly for you as compared to even a contracted team?
I hope this will open up eyes of everyone including contextual advertising publishers, pay per click advertisers and pay per click search engines that take the help of true devoted partners for distributing contextual advertising from their clients in order to make money.
For the sake of everyone, I’m distributing this message to a few web sites so that everyone gets woke up by the all of the hour.
Thank you.
Tracy Norman.
Michael Hampton
Sep 06, 2005
“Tracy,” the fact remains that you got thrown out of AdSense for click fraud. Now go away and stop trying to defraud Google and the rest of us.
Sep 14, 2005
blogyourwaytoprofits.com»Blog Archive » Prevent Adsense Own Clicks
Jan 15, 2006
im web gefunden » Google AdSense - klick nicht auf Deine eigenen Anzeigen
May 16, 2006
SridhaReena: CMS, Scripts, Software, Technology, WordPress, and everything Internet
April
Aug 18, 2006
Hello
I have tried to use this. I got the pop-up asking for my publisher id. I copied and pasted it from my adsense a/c. Then clicked on one my ads and it wasn’t blocked.
I have tried un-installing and and re-installing but haven’t got the pop up box again.
I’m not sure what to do now and I’m scared that I will be done for click fraud even though I immediately click the back button on the browser.
Please help!
April
Michael Hampton
Aug 18, 2006
Well, first, you aren’t supposed to click on your ads. :) If you really feel you must “test” it, you can click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link instead.
Second, are you sure that you put the correct publisher ID in? If you open up about:config then search for greasemonkey you will be able to inspect and change the stored value. In particular, you should omit the ca- prefix. It should say pub- whatever.
nitin
Dec 30, 2006
hi my a/c was blocked by the google plz help me i want to restart this a/c how i restart how i plz help me ?
Jan 27, 2007
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