I think I found out a small part of how Google prevents you from just going to your own website and clicking ads: they just ignore a bunch of clicks all coming from the same source. I’m sure this is obvious, and I wasn’t trying to run up my ad revenue by clicking my own ads, but in testing my ads I did click on them a lot, and my revenue for yesterday was nada. Zilch. Zip. Not even the 7 whole cents that I made the first day. I think I was the only one visiting my blog though.
It seems like they don’t update your daily earnings until the end of the day. I’m sure there’s forums or guides out there that explain all this, and I may invest the time to read one if I ever get serious about using this kind of advertising, but for now I just want to get a feel for how it works.
I’d be very careful about clikcing your own ads, even if you’re just testing, as Google could ban you from using AdSense if they thought it was fraudulent activity.
Comment by Rob Lewis — October 26, 2005 @ 2:26 pm