Friday, September 14, 2007

Can I Click On My Own Adsense Ads?

The answer is "No" - of course. Now it is understandable if you click on your own ad by accident - even adsense acknowledges that they can understand the occassional click by mistake HOWEVER if you continully click on your own ads not only will they be counted as invalid clicks you also risk having your entire Adsense account cancelled!

Here is an excerpt from Adsense's own site:

Invalid Clicks and Impressions


Clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest. Any method that artificially generates clicks or impressions on your Google ads is strictly prohibited. These prohibited methods include but are not limited to repeated manual clicks or impressions, using robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited. Failure to comply with this policy may lead to your account being disabled.

4 comments:

donkeykong said...

uhh actually today i accidentally did same :( now what i'll be banned ?

Sister2brother said...

Like I said in my blog post, Google's Adsense page says that they "understand the occassional accidental click" so if this is the first time that you clicked your own ad then I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you.

However if it does worry you then you should send Adsense a quick note/email telling them that you accidently clicked on your own ad.

Honesty is the best policy - right?

Oh, and to answer your question on whether or not you will be banned for accidently clicking on your own ad - if its the first time that you did this - the answer should be no.

Anonymous said...

So where/how do I inform AdSense that such an accident happened? I've been working on building my web site and hence I'm regularly refreshing and checking things as I work out bugs on different browsers and over the net.

Sister2brother said...

You go to Adsense's "Contact" site at:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?

and click on "Invalid Clicks" and some sub-headings will show - one of which says "I accidently clicked on my own ads". You fill out the form and send it in to adsense.