I know this won’t fix things or make it easier – but I hear from AdSense publishers from time to time that get similar emails – their rejection email goes on about possible ‘invalid clicks’ from memory and they rarely respond with more details than this.

While it’s frustrating I can also see their side of things in that they obviously don’t want to reveal all the details of how they track invalid clicks because it would give those who do defraud them the amunition they need to do it better.

Of course this leaves us publishers in a frustrating position – not knowing what we’ve done or what we can do about it. It sucks all around.

once again – sorry to hear of your bad experience.

We are sending this message to inform you that your account ID: xxxx has been suspended. Traffic analysis for your account highlighted plausible fraudulent activity or a breach of our terms and conditions and we are suspending your account until we resolve this issue. We are also working with our ad partners to reject all fraudulent clicks and refund the amounts.

Please remove our code from your web pages immediately. You will not be paid for any fraudulent traffic or for any traffic going forward.

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To say I was perturbed is to put it mildy. I had not been engaged in any activity that could be considered fraudulent. My click through figures were pretty much in line with the previous month’s. And before anyone starts to wonder how many thousands of dollars I must have been making from Chitika…my first month’s earnings were in the region of $50! The figures I were being being shown on my Chitika account for impressions etc all looked sensible to me and tied in with the numbers I was getting both from Adsense and the stats counter I used.

Something was wrong. So I tried to log in to my Chitika account to check things. Suspension really did mean suspension, though. I could no longer get into my account to verify my numbers. I emailed Chitika, asking for further explaination. It’s now 2 weeks later, and Chitika’s customer support has not seen seen fit to reply to any of my 3 emails, nor to explain what they think may be fraudulent about my figures.

If Chitika are going to throw claims of “plausible fraudulent activity” at people, they should at least have the professionalism to respond to queries I have regarding such claims.

The Chitika honeymoon is over for me.

I could have understood it if the campaign was running worldwide, or if the clicks were coming from free search engine traffic, since I realize Chitika audits out most foreign clicks, but the AdWords campaign was restricted to U.S. and Canada.

I’m not talking about 3 clicks being audited down to 2 here, I’m talking about
hundreds per day being chopped down by 37%.

Competitors clicking? Maybe, I don’t know. If Chitika support were to respond telling me I had 50 clicks on an ad from the same IP address, I’d take it as a fact and move on, but when they respond after 6 days, say check our blog entry and you’ll get your answer to all your questions, and that’s it, then I’m miffed.

What’s your conversion rate for your AdWords program for that month? It’s possible your competitors could be performing click fraud against you, trying to get your ad programs banned, etc.

Plus, Chitika’s canned responses are extremely similar to the AdSense responses I was receiving. CPC advertisers are too secretive about their auditing processes and publishers like us are left in the dark.

Which site would you recommend for the best performance ..but come to think about it I bet there is a link on your site that will answer the question …sorry if i am wasting your time

If you want to brighten up your day …although I do know it is bright enough at the mo in oz then check out the skeleton vid on my blog its hilarious

Rob

http://ebay4beginners.blogspot.com/2006/01/puppet-on-string.html