Eliminate invalid traffic  is not just good for AdSense, but it’s essential to your website and user experience. Invalid traffic threatens ad revenue, clouds marketing metrics, and muddies conversion rates. It also hurts publisher reputation and causes advertisers to lose confidence in their publishers, resulting in lost ad spend.

Guarding Your Clicks: Strategies to Block and Filter Out Invalid Traffic in Digital Advertising

There are many different types of invalid traffic. Some are benign and some are downright fraudulent. Some are caused by poor ad placement and intrusive ads, while others are caused by fraudsters who click on your ads to generate ad impressions and revenue for themselves. Invalid traffic of all kinds costs marketers billions of dollars this year.

The most common and least harmful is General Invalid Traffic (GIVT), which is typically bots or crawlers that aren’t trying to simulate human behavior. These are easy to spot with routine ad filtration tools using lists of known bots and spiders and regular parameter checks on your website and ad performance. Other forms of IVT are more sophisticated. One of the most common is ad stacking, where a single ad is stacked on top of another to earn multiple payouts.

Another is cookie stuffing, where multiple third-party cookies are stuffed onto users’ browsers to trick AdSense into paying for multiple impressions that have never been viewed by humans. These types of scams can be more difficult to detect with automated tools, but it’s important to watch out for a sudden increase in traffic that isn’t explained by other factors.