How you can prevent invalid activity

While our traffic quality team uses both automatic and manual methods to filter out invalid clicks, we also need publishers to follow our policies in order to reduce the possibility of invalid activity.

A general rule of thumb is to always put your users first – make sure that your ads don’t draw unnatural attention, mislead users, encourage clicks or appear in places that may cause invalid clicks. If we find a large amount of invalid activity in your app(s), then you may be at risk of account disablement. We also refund revenue generated from invalid clicks to affected advertisers. To find out more about this, please review “Estimated vs. finalised earnings”.

In order to help prevent invalid activity on your apps, please read the following articles:

• Implementation guidance
• Banner ad guidance
• Interstitial ad guidance

As a publisher, you are responsible for ensuring that your ad implementation complies with our AdSense programme policies, and that you haven’t paid for traffic from unreliable sources.

Here are some additional tips to further help you prevent invalid activity on your apps:

To find out more about our systems and process for preventing invalid activity, please visit the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Centre.

• Don’t click your own ads, even if you think it’s okay to do so. Publishers may not click on their own ads or use any means to inflate impressions and/or clicks artificially, including manual methods. Testing your own ads by clicking on them is not allowed. Please use test ads (available for Android or iOS) to avoid generating invalid clicks.


• Understand your ad traffic and app users. Break down your traffic reports into meaningful segments using app filters such as app name, ad unit and country. This will help you gauge how changes to traffic sources or implementation can affect your ad traffic. You can use Google Analytics to get detailed information about your app visitors, and be on the lookout for any suspicious user behaviour. Some questions to ask yourself:
  • Where do my users come from?
  • How are they interacting with my app?
  • Which screens do they view in my app?
  Find out more about how you can use Google Analytics in AdMob and how to implement the Google Analytics SDK for Android (also available for iOS).


• Avoid partnering with untrusted / low-quality parties. Some publishers have had issues with invalid activity when partnering with low-quality ad networks or app promotion sites in efforts to increase traffic to their app.