Recently I gave Google AdSense a try on my site and to my supprise there were quite a few clicks. One of their many rules is that you can't click on your own ads, for obvious reasons. After a while I decided to add the search feature to my "start" page that shows up as the bookmark homepage on the computers in my network. I already had the Google search box, so it was just a matter of adding my client ID and then when people search and click on an ad that comes up in the results page, I would get a credit.
Unfortunately my dad isn't particularly web savvy, and went ahead and clicked on a few ads without realizing that they were ads and not genuine search results. These showed up in the reports as clicks with $0.00 value, so I realized what had happened right away. Unfortunately Google in their infinite wisdom doesn't allow you to block clicks from your own IP address, so there's no way to preventatively take care of the problem if you don't have full control over the activity coming from your IP, and of course when they disable your account there's no dispute mechanism. This seems rather dumb, there are some other good reasons that one would want to be able to click on the ads
without having them count as clicks, such as to check out the site, because you can block certain ads from appearing on your site with the competitive ad filter. How are you supposed to be able to get the address of the site you want to block if you can't click on the ads? This simple feature, allowing clicks but not counting them from your own IP would be good for advertisers too, because they get free traffic, and since the ads are related to the contents of my site, I might actually be interested enough to buy something with the advertising revenue. Google wouldn't have to kick as many customers out of their system for accidental clicking, meaning more business for them. I guess something like that would make a bit too much sense for AdSense.
Update - June 26:
I just got my AdSense PIN in the mail today, once you have a $50 credit, they send this PIN to your address so it's confirmed before they send you money. Once you have a $100 credit they send out a check. Their system triggered this PIN to be sent out on May 16, but a couple days later the account was locked due to clicks from my IP. I didn't think they would send the PIN, and if they did, then it would arrive within a couple weeks. No wonder they can't make basic improvements to the user interface if their back-end is so slow and inefficient as to send me the PIN anyways, but over a month later. I guess that also explains why the special media-partners bots were scraping my site constantly after my account was shut down. Some 403 (Forbidden) responses sorted them out.
