Google Adsense: The Pros and Cons plus Click Fraud

Well this is a description of the pros and cons of this approach to Internet advertising. AdSense has definitely hit the Internet like something from another planet and people are very excited about it everywhere. There are negative aspects to Adsense and alternatives to consider.

AdSense is a very good means of generating constant revenue on your site. All you need to do is create some quality content and keep it updated constantly and you can literally live off your website. A lot of people are doing just that nowadays with AdSense, so it’s become sort of a business in itself.

Clearly the largest negative impact the AdSense program can have on you is through Google closing your accounts. Most of the time this happens because of so called ‘click fraud’, which means somebody would be producing artificial clicks on your page.

Google can close your account for “click fraud”. There’s one really nasty side to that. It doesn’t have to be you making those artificial clicks. It could very well be your competition doing this in order to shut you down, or the competitor of whoever is advertising on your page, looking to drive their marketing costs up.

You should try and make your site rank high in search engines. If you fail to do that you won’t have any visitors, and that of course means you won’t have any AdSense revenue. In a way this is nothing new, as any form of generating revenue on the Internet with advertising has such a drawback.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates online or you can learn to design them.

The “click fraud”

There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google’s AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.

One of the most complex is through the use of so called “hitbots”. These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some that actually click the banners as well).

To prevent “fraud clicks” from happening, many people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What’s even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.

It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.

Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google’s AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.