Off and on from about July 12 - 17, a couple of totally unrelated pages on our site suddenly reported (one on a single page URL based chanel and the other on a subdirectory level URL chanel) an astronomical number of impressions, on the order of the total of all the rest of our pages put together. I did the usual check to see if we had suddenly hit #1 on a suddenly popular topic on the SE's and came up with nothing. I finally downloaded the raw logs to see where all these visitors were being referred from and for what terms, and discovered there were only the usual handful of visits to those two pages. One of the pages does have an original photo which happened to be ranked #1 by G in the images section for a rather obscure past celebrity, but that is about it. Any other suggestions of things to check for to figure out if there is a valid reason for so many ad impressions with no actual page loads in the logs? I can't imagine someone who just views the photo via google's image section without even loading the original page could trigger an ad impression could it? Also the increase in impressions unfortunately came without any significant increase in clicks, which drove our usually very consistant CTR to about 1/2 of usual (twice as many impressions reported for same number of clicks). It's like either G is simply overreporting impressions on these two pages or some one person is reloading our page from a cache and thus not clcking the ads (neither is the type of page one would normally tend to monitor and reload frequnetly). Nothing at all tricky being done on either page. Is there some way someone could be serving our page from another server but it shows up as coming from our URL to be counted by G? Any way someone could refresh the ads without refreshing the page? I'm at a loss.
I hate to write to Adsense support in these situations because every time I do, they are rarely helpful or forthcoming with any real solution and then they wind up screwing something up or setting some switch that causes our PPC to drop 20% or more over night and last for months thereafter.