My favorite Google AdSense engineer is talking again in the Google AdSense Help forum. First he said that invalid traffic earnings were never really earned and now he goes on to explain why it is a waste of Google’s time to investigate appeals towards invalid clicks issues.

Imagine, you are earning a nice side income with Google AdSense and all of a sudden, your earnings drop. Google tells you it is because of invalid traffic. You say what? And they send you a link to the invalid clicks and you say no way, this is not happening. Now what?

Well, according to Google AdSense Engineer, Google is not eager to investigate these reports. Why?

(1) Investigating invalid traffic is “often extremely difficult.”

(2) It would require “hours of manual investigation by a specialist, many exchanges with the publisher, probably experiments over long periods of time.”

(3) There is likely no “guarantee of success” in going this route. Meaning, even if they do tell you about the details of the invalid traffic, there isn’t much you can do to prevent it and bring earnings back to the levels you had prior.

Here is what Google’s Guillaume said:

Forum discussion at Google AdSense Help.