It’s not very often that I will say anything negative against Google. In fact I use a slew of their “free” offerings ranging from GMail to Adsense to Webmaster Tools to Blogger to Reader to Drive to Talk to… well you get the point. Not long ago osTicket released a new version, and as most of you know I’m a fairly avid supporter or and member of the osTicket community and have been for several years… This of course means that my site got a slew of traffic and much of it from osticket.com. (I would especially like to thank those of you who visited this free site and chose to click on a Google Adsense ad as a thank you!)
It was a huge treat to see my sites traffic slowly just keep going up last month. I imagine that its how people who launch successful sites must feel when they realize that their site just might have a following and that all their hard work has finally paid off. Since February the sites average unique visitors per month has steadily climbed until it peaked at just about 2004 in April. [I know 2004 unique visitors isn’t a lot, but it was 700 more then the month before!] It is kinda thrilling to see dollars instead of cents in your Adsense reports. How do I know these traffic metrics? Because I use Google Analytics of course!
However it is NOT thrilling to getting an email from Adsense over the weekend when your out getting your free comic books on Free Comic Book day saying that your account has been suspended due to suspicious click activity just days before your supposed to find out what your biggest month ever of traffic has gained you.
Really Google? Really? I mean come on. I’ve been using Adsense for a few years now. I’ve gotten exactly one check for exceeding the $100 threshold in all that time. I’ve had it for months and haven’t even cashed it. In fact its probably not even good anymore since I think that it says that it has to be cashed within 90 days. Why? Because I feel that my first $100 from Google would make a great wall decoration. I want to frame it and hang it on the wall. Obviously my account was dangerous and posed a risk to your AdWords advertisers…
updated May 17th, 2013: corrected unique visitor count for the month of April. I misreported the amount of unique site visitors since I read the report wrong. The number reported was 550, the actual number is 2004 550 was the high day watermark. Oops!