Estimated vs finalized earnings

The reports in your 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 finalized until the end of the month, which is when we adjust for invalid clicks or impressions. Revenue from invalid clicks and impressions is refunded back to affected advertisers. We make sure you are paid for the finalized earnings, which includes all valid clicks and impressions. The finalized earnings amount is posted to your payments and transaction history tab.

Invalid activity deductions may cause a difference between your estimated earnings and finalized earnings. We do this to ensure that our advertisers only pay for valid traffic, which in turn protects our broader advertising ecosystem that includes 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 you may be able to fix.
• Report invalid clicks or impressions on your ads to our traffic quality specialists using this invalid activity form. In your report, please provide as much information as possible. The details you provide will aid our traffic quality team in investigating 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 Center.