There is always this debate of honest or dishonest marketing. When done in the wrong ways, advertising usually hurts the customers. A customer might end up on a page that sells underwear while he/she originally clicked a link to get more information about some article or was looking to download a song from the internet.
The issue here is that advertising is done in many wrong ways. It is the job of the publishers i.e. website owners, to ensure that their ads are located in places where they look like ads. If they cannot take of this, they won’t have to anymore because Google just took the responsibility of fixing this problem on its own.
Google’s Plans for AdSense in the Coming Days
Perhaps Google has sniffed something fishy going on with online advertisements. Perhaps, some people are making money in all sorts of deceptive ways while hurting Google as a host for advertisers. Of course, Google AdWords provides a way for marketers to put their ads on the internet. Google selects publishers from its AdSense network and puts the ads on their websites.
Visitors of those websites click on those ads to know about products and purchase them. But what if the customers are not even clicking on the ads or the people clicking on the ads are clicking only for the sake of it. The marketers, who have paid for the ads, get nothing out of their efforts in this scenario.
They point their fingers at Google because if bots or non-customers are clicking on the ads only for the clicks, it is Google’s job to make sure that they don’t. Of course, Google has finally realized its job and has taken the action by cracking down on ads that are not generated naturally or with the intention of purchasing products.
Google’s decision is to crack down on any ads that are getting invalid click traffic. Now, the concept of invalid click traffic has to be understood here to know what exactly the search engine giant is doing and how much sense it makes. What publishers have to know, at the end of the day, is that they will not be showing any ads on their websites that get invalid clicks.
Understanding the Concept of Invalid Traffic/Clicks
Invalid traffic or clicks can be in many different forms. The simple definition of these clicks is that the clicker does not have the intention to click on the ad or/and to purchase the product. This click could be a result of an illegal activity or an accident.
One of the types of clicks that will not be entertained by Google include multiple clicks coming from the same user. Now, this user might be clicking on the same ad for a natural or unnatural reason. Perhaps, the user’s computer has frozen but he/she is constantly clicking on the ad to get to the other page.
On the other hand, it could be someone clicking on the ad only to make the publisher look good in the eye of the advertiser. Of course, the more clicks occur on the publisher’s website, the more money he/she gets from them.
Another type of clicks that Google will not entertain are those taking place accidentally or intentionally by the publishers themselves. Just because you are a website owner does not mean you cannot click on the ad on your website. You might click it to see whether or not the ad is working fine.
But how many times a publisher can click on an ad? That’s a good question. It might not seem like many clicks, but that’s not the case. For Google, who has millions of publishers posting millions of ads on their websites on a daily basis, these invalid clicks could mean hundreds of millions of dollars at the end of the month.
The most deceptive form of these ads come from the publishers themselves. You can say that these ads are common among bloggers because they are trying to make money from the ads and they can go to any length to do that.
What they do is that they place ads in certain placements on their websites where they are bound to get clicked accidentally. The website owner might put the ad right under a menu or very close to a button that the visitors are encouraged to click on to view some more content.
Last but not least, you have the clicks coming illegally from clickbots or the publishers themselves. Yes, some publishers know each other and they would click on each other’s ads or ask their followers to click on those ads to earn revenue. Clickbots are used to get several ads in a day. There are online companies that sell these clicks to the websites owners for very cheap.
The Consequences of the Crackdown
Google, of course, is in the best condition to tell what the consequences of its crackdown will be. One thing is for sure: no one is going to get hurt in this crackdown. Google has announced that only a very small number of publishers will be affected by this crackdown.
At the same time, Google has also made it clear that it will only send a notification to the victim, i.e., the publishers who are found with a lot of ads with such clicks. After the notification, according to Google, the publishers can just take the necessary steps to make sure their ads are not attracting the invalid traffic in question.
Google’s Will Is Always Strong
The one thing that you can say for sure about Google is that this company does what it intends to do. When it thought of driverless cars, it made them possible. When it came to cracking down on poor SEO techniques, it cleaned the SEO world with its constant and continuous algorithm updates. Now, Google has taken the responsibility of cleaning its ads of any invalid traffic. One can say that the search engine giant will keep coming with new updates to ensure publishers do not fall back on the shady techniques to get clicks on their ads again.
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