CloudFlare and it’s effect on Adsense CTR and CPC
December 30, 2011 in Blogging!
So, CloudFlare or CF for short is a “free” service, it is used to speed up, and “protect?” your blog or website from spammers, hackers, etc. I decided to try it on this blog and see how it can help, what’s the worst that can happen right?
Activating CloudFlare is easy, create a free account, add your site, it will sniff some of your DNS records, you need to confirm them, and then it asks you to change your DNS name server from your host to them.
How Does CloudFlare work?
- A visitor try`s to visit your website.
- CloudFlare will decide if this visitor is a nice guy or a malicious creep.
- A nice guy will have immidiate access, while the creep get’s a “challenge”, a page from CloudFlare asking for your visitor to enter a captcha.
- If cloude fire has some of your static contents cached, it will serve them to the visitor instead of loading them from your server, as a CDN of some sort. and that is how CloudFlare will speed up your website.
CloudFlare: The good, the Bad and the Ugly:
Truth be told, the speedup part is real. page load times are improved, and you will consume less bandwidth. The protection bit anyway is a little of an over stretch. CloudFlare may really protect you from some bots, vulnerability scanners etc, but it will challenge many of your legit visitors as well, making many bounce directly off the challenge page. And the tricky part is: you can not fully disable CloudFlare secuirty, if it wasn`t for the adsense disaster that I’ll discuss in a bit, I would have stuck with CloudFlare just for the caching part, if I was able to turn security off.
In my case. CloudFlare considered around 50% of my visitors to be a threat! and that my friend, is with the security level set to LOW! As we all know,”free cheese is in the mouse trap” I think CloudFlare is making some money off the challenge page, and that`s how they can afford to offer “free” CDN for everyone.
CloudFlare and Adsense
Now for the worst part: Adsense. although this really shouldn’t happen as CloudFlare only acts between the server and the browser, while adsense loads directly from the visitor browser to Google`s servers. CloudFlare ruined my Adsense income.
For the two days that I had CloudFlare on, my income dropped to less than 0.5$ a day!!! my average CPC dropped to $0.01, and click count dropped to half what it usually is. Some might argue that the rest of my income was coming from malicious robot clicks, but do you really believe that google will pay you for such traffic?
I honestly don’t have a clear Idea about the source of this conflict between CloudFlare and Adsense, I was not willing to stick around for long to find out! I tried white listing some IPs from the US assuming that one of them may be an Adsense crawler that is used to determine the contents of a page. but it didn’t work. So I just opted out, restored my original Name servers, and now my income is starting to get back to normal.
Bottom line is CloudFlare can really speed up your website, and protect you from some potential hackers. But you may want to test the effects of it on your adsense, and visitors before permanently applying it to all your websites.
CloudFlare and it’s effect on Adsense CTR and CPC
14 Comments
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Bouzid,
Thanks for using CloudFlare. I work at the company, and was surprised (and disappointed) to see your report of issues with AdSense. Many of our more than 100,000 website customers use AdSense, of course, and we have not had reports of issues. I’m going to ask a colleague to review your site to see what might have caused an adverse effect.
John
Hi John. I also can’t understand how can Cloudflare affect Adsense.but please believe that I have checked and found some more reports about people that noticed a clear impact of their adsense performance shortly after starting with cloudflare. before I wrote this post.
The other issue is the security, as I wrote, around 50% of my visitors were considered a treat, that cant be true. why? because more than 90% of my traffic comes from google, and as you know, google will detect and challenge suspicious search activities. And I rarely get real visitors that try to write spam comments. so where are the suspicious 50% that cloudflare has stopped?
I don’t know Google’s security rules, but suspicious search activities are different than suspicious website activity, overall. CloudFlare is protecting against the latter.
Turn off Browser Integrity Check when you try CloudFlare again. That’s a useful security measure, but if you want to lower security to near zero, then turn it off.
Given the New Year’s Day holiday weekend, I’m not expecting to have more info for you until next week, but definitely investigating.
John
I had exactly the same problem and the Google Adsense support team told me the problem was because “users” used the same IP address. Makes sense when the CloudFlare proxy access anything. Unfortunately my web hosting provider doesn’t want to install mod_cloudflare to the web server. Understandable. So nothing I can do as consumer. Checking that the official CloudFlare rep didn’t write a (public) follow-up anymore.. it just confirms that my decision was correct to remove CloudFlare.
PS: If one just searches for “cloudflare problem” or “cloudflare adsense” s/he finds thousands of people with exactly the same problems.
We track every report about this, and welcome details/evidence, especially via support.cloudflare.com where we can work back and forth with details and traceroutes privately with the customer.
CloudFlare and AdSense work fine together, and — again — we’re happy to work through any and every indication otherwise.
We’ve spoken to the crawl teams at all the major search engines and similar discussions with ad networks. They know that CloudFlare is a reverse proxy and that our IP addresses are not representing the original visitor IP — and that’s OK. We ALWAYS pass the original visitor IP in the headers.
John / CloudFlare
Hi Devon
Can you please copy the complete reply you received from the Adsense support? it would be useful for everyone, thanks
All of my sites have adsense and I read that a lot of people have this problem with the lower revenues and I that is the main reason why I don’t use CloudFlare, I installed it, changed the nameservers, but when I read with the problems with adsense I preferred not to risk and disabled it.
@John Roberts just google it and you will see from what the people are complaining, we will be all happy if this problem is resolved.
I was going to use CloudFlare one of my web sites too, but this post has caused me to think about it. I am going to keep an eye on this post and watch for new comments. Thanks for your report anyway.
Hi
Are you still using cloudFlare? any changes with your adsense performance?
The thing is that many people are confirming this issue and much more others are happy with couldflare, some even reported an increase in their revenue.
I hope John Roberts will come back with more details
Actually I haven’t used CloudFare yet, just I was about to use. My web site has been in trouble with some other performance related things such as high server loads and poorly usage of php & mysql. I would like my site to work as normal as it is so I can start using CloudFlare and watch for more realistic results.
same for me … i was going to subscribe but i’m now afraid of trying cloudflare with adsense
I was reading through the post and noticed the comments.
I was a paid customer with cloudflare for 5 months with 3 websites.
And I can confirm my Adsense revenue did drop considerably.
I love the who idea for security, I loved the features cloudflare provides to protect agains hackers and spammers.
But overall I have very high server costs to pay and the way my Adsense revenue dropped while I was with cloudflare, I had to decide, keep my forum safe or keep it running.
I found some information about Adsense and Cloudflare problem.
http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/activating-ludicrous-speed-combine-cloudflare-with-a-cdn-on-your-blog/#comment-17328
There is one feature that must be turned off.
Ok, google have js and cloudfire has the restriction ip, ads from google came from adwords advertisers that check the url were the ad is served for payment issues, so look like a spammer to clowdfire eyes? maybe