The confirmed click penalty, which is also known as 2 click penalty, and “visit site overlay” is no longer shadow penalty and is being officially warned about by Google. This technical gimmick that lets Alphabet protect its advertisers from paying for bad clicks, has been around for quite some time. Still, it was never really acknowledged officially by Google, even though it might have quite an impact on the revenue coming from Google AdX.
A Confirmed click penalty is basically the result of an algorithm from Google, that has its own logic in place to track users' misclicks on ads within the company’s demand. It enforce an additional div element on the creative that once the user clicks on the ad, shows an overlay “Visit site” prompting the user to click one more time on it to confirm its intentions.
The result usually includes a sharp drop in AdX revenue, mostly from demand runs on the CPC model (paying for a click, instead of paying for impressions).
And up until this year, the Google confirmed click penalty came out of nowhere and was frequently left unnoticed. Publishers found out about it only after they’ve either asked their Google rep about the penalty, consulted with an AdOps that is aware of it, accidentally clicking on an affected ad on your own website, or seeing it inside Yield Analytics, where Assertive Yield tracks the presence of the penalty on our clients.
With the confirmed click penalty getting officialized, we now also have a written guide on potential causes for it, with Google sharing these as a piece of advice within the admin panel:
Check your ads for:
And go further in their documentation:
As far as we are aware, the feature is currently rolled out, so keep in mind that it might still not be available for your GAM account, although we’ve seen it already multiple times.
There are of course some aspects of the two-click penalty that are not covered in the documentation. From our experience, these are some of the tips you should be aware of when battling with the algorithm to get back the full scale of your AdX demand:
In any case - dealing with the 2-click penalty on your site might be a tedious process, involving AdOps and Dev teams, trying to understand what the root cause may be. Knowing that it exists on your site can help you take measures earlier on, and it’s good that Google has addressed this, making it officialized and thus - easier to spot.
The transition to Yield Manager led to a significant improvements in World History Encyclopedia's programmatic advertising revenue. Within weeks, they witnessed a remarkable 25% increase in overall advertising revenue from programmatic advertising. This increase continued to grow, ultimately reaching an impressive 63%+.
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