Forum Moderators: martinibuster
When I checked the log (saving it to my local machine if needed), I found that all, literally all, of the traffic was coming in via AOL search from one particular search phrase which brought up an image on the site, which AOL displays as a a thumbnail above the normal search results. This was a search phrase that normally brings only a few visits per month. But the traffic was coming in from all different IP addresses, different hosts, from different parts of the country, and with the normal and expected distribution of operating systems and user-agents. And the CTR on the ads was around 5% -- also perfectly within the normal range. It sure appeared to be real traffic from real people, but it was something like 1,000 times the usual amount of traffic to that site, in just 2 hours.
I panicked! I reported the unusual activity to Google, of course, using their form. (Which form, by the way, is difficult to find if you don't have it bookmarked.)
But in addition to panicking and reporting, I also suspended the site. I unsuspended the site the next day, but removed the AdSense blocks from the page that was getting all the traffic.
When I finally heard back from Google, it sounded like they were considering the traffic to be legitimate, and the clicks and earnings are still showing in my account. They told me I could put my AdSense ads back on and that they would be "monitoring" things closely. But by then, the traffic surge had dropped to a trickle. :(
Either way -- legitimate traffic or not -- I think I overreacted by suspending the site. After all, if Google found those clicks to be invalid, they could cancel out 2,000 clicks or 20,000 clicks just as easily as they can cancel out 200, couldn't they? And if the traffic and clicks were indeed legitimate, I may have just overreacted myself out of a few hundred dollars.
What should a publisher do, if anything, in addition to reporting such unusual activity to Google? Did I indeed overreact? Or did I, by taking prompt action to prevent possible click fraud, demonstrate to Google that I'm an honest publisher, and possibly make it less likely that my account might be inactivated?
I presonally don't think that you should have to constantly monitor your site for "unusal" activity. Your ad supplier should be sophisticated enougth to tell the difference between legitamate traffic and someone trying to defraud their system.
It is not unusual for the serps to change in your favor. I have seen pages rise and fall with a change in ranking from perspective search engines. Enjoy the surge and keep working hard.
[edited by: Edge at 12:44 pm (utc) on Mar. 14, 2008]
Edge, you're making assumptions about my revenue based on facts not in evidence. My post said nothing about the diversity of my revenue sources. My AdSense income is a small fraction of my total revenue, which comes in from a variety of sources. However, it's a big enough chunk of revenue that I really don't want my account to be cancelled.
Edge, you're making assumptions about my revenue based on facts not in evidence. My post said nothing about the diversity of my revenue sources. My AdSense income is a small fraction of my total revenue, which comes in from a variety of sources. However, it's a big enough chunk of revenue that I really don't want my account to be cancelled.
Sorry...
one particular search phrase
You just never know where traffic is going to come from.
did the phrase relate to something that hit the news or something similar.
Not that I've been able to find out. It's a long-tail term (very long tail) and doesn't get many searches at all, as far as I can tell. I found one reference in a newspaper to an event this weekend that mentioned the search phrase and had a picture of the thing (not the pic on my site) -- but it was a smallish local event that shouldn't have drawn the kind of traffic I was suddenly seeing.
I guess it could have been a question in the NYT crossword or something like that. But nothing major that I could find anywhere online (or off) to explain the numbers I was seeing.
The sheer inexplicableness was what made me panic! Despite looking in many respects like real people, there was just no reason that I could find, and I thought it had to be some sort of distributed bot or something.
Now I regret my instinctive reaction. And I got to wondering if other AdSense publishers have experienced similar inexplicable surges, and what actions, if any, they took.
I'm still sort of hoping ASA will chime here with input from a real live Googler. :)
The sheer inexplicableness was what made me panic!
As noted by mine, jetteroheller's and bateman_ap's posts above, sometimes the most (seemingly) bizarre search patterns can be perfectly normal.
If you notice unusual activity on your account, and believe the click activity may be invalid, you can send us the details via the Invalid Clicks Contact Form: [google.com...]
Reports submitted via this form are investigated, and we will follow up with you if we find a significant issue with your account.
