The reports in your AdMob account are intended to give you estimates on the current activity in your account. However, the estimated earnings found under your account’s performance reports tab are not finalised until the end of the month, which is when we adjust for invalid clicks. Revenue from invalid clicks and impressions is refunded back to affected advertisers. We make sure that you are paid for the finalised earnings - which includes all valid clicks and impressions. The finalised earnings amount is posted to your payments and transaction history tab.
Invalid activity deductions may result in a difference between your estimated earnings and finalised earnings. We do this to ensure that our advertisers only pay for valid clicks, which in turn protects our broader advertising ecosystem, including you.
We also reserve the right to adjust a publisher’s earnings in the case that an advertiser who advertised on the publisher’s mobile app defaults on payment. These advertisers may have used stolen credit cards or otherwise defaulted on payments. Google works diligently to ensure that these instances are rare in order to maintain a safe ecosystem for users, publishers, and advertisers.
To maintain the integrity of our invalid activity detection system and prevent users from circumventing the system, we aren't able to provide details about how much was adjusted per day or per app. We have these invalid activity protections in place to keep our network of AdMob applications a safe and useful environment for advertisers, publishers and users. However, here are some steps to help you identify and reduce invalid activity:
- Use Google Analytics in AdMob to investigate any changes in traffic sources over the last 90 days. Look out for spikes in traffic/downloads from unknown sources.
- Review the implementation guidance. Interstitial ads, when implemented poorly, may lead to a high number of invalid clicks. Please go through the interstitial ad guidance and banner ad guidance. Invalid activity often results from poor ad implementation, which can be fixed.
- Report invalid clicks on your ads to our traffic quality specialists on this invalid activity form. In your report, please provide as much information as possible. The details you provide will aid our traffic quality team to investigate your account. You may not receive a personal response from them, but a note will be added to your account for future reference.
For additional information on ad traffic quality, please visit the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Centre.