Adsense says accidental clicks are normal

Adsense said in their blog that accidents happen. They’re referring to accidental clicks - clicks made by the Adsense publishers themselves. Many a publisher new to Adsense would eventually have experienced the cold sweat of accidentally clicking on their own ads and thinking to themselves “Oh crap… I’m going to get banned”. It’s so easy to accidentally click on your own ads when you’re working with multiple windows, constantly switching back and forth between editors, graphic editors, ftp clients and browser windows. Google’s TOS specifically prohibits webmasters from clicking on their own ads. This includes their family members, friends and working associates who may be clicking the ads to “help” the webmaster inflate their Adsense earnings.

Adsense says that there is NO need to contact them everytime you make an accidental click :

I’ve been wondering why they’d make such a statement. Remember, Google is a BIG company and they don’t do anything without reason. One “conspiracy theory” comes to my twisted mind :

Webmasters have been so careful NOT to click their own ads that they’ve developed a condition often referred to as “click-a-phobia“. Not only do they not click on their own ads, they also find themselves avoiding ads on other sites. I’ve got to admit I’m like that. Consider this - if there are a million webmasters with this condition who are NOT clicking ANY ad (their own or someone else’s) then that’s potentially a million un-clicked ads everyday! Now imagine if the number of Adsense publishers grew to 10 million. And if only half of these developed click-a-phobia, that would mean 5 million un-clicked ads a day. Them’s a whole lotta dough.

So, maybe Google realized click-a-phobia was costing them money, and they needed to tell webmasters to chill. If they can alay webmasters’ fears of clicking their own ads, maybe they begin to reverse the effects of click-a-phobia which might just help them click on other ads too.

In any case, will I just let my next accidental click slide without informing Google? Heck NO! Like many other Adsense publishers, I’m a paranoid nut. I just don’t trust Google to police tens of millions of clicks a day without letting through a percentage of errors. And I sure don’t want to the in that small percentage of publishers that gets that dreaded “invalid clicks” email because they screwed up. So they next time I make an accidental click, I’m going to keep my nose clean, be a good boy and email them. I hope you will too.

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