400 people from adwords, but I don't have any account

[mediba]

I saw the most strange thing today for yesterdays stats on one of my sites. The site has about 500 unique visitors / day and that has been pretty stable for the last months. But yesterday it got up to 1300 unique visitors. I checked my google analytics account and there wasen't any changes in the search marketing (visitors from search engines). So I looked in the "Reffering Source" and found something that haven't been there before: "pagead2.googlesyndication.com". When I've advertised with adwords in the past, the keywords has shown in "Overall Keyword Conversion" but there aren't changes in there from the other days. I don't have any ads running for the site on adwords...

Where are these visitors comming from, what are they? They seems to be well spread around on all pages.

[Micromag]

Originally Posted by mediba

So I looked in the "Reffering Source" and found something that haven't been there before: "pagead2.googlesyndication.com".

pagead2.googlesyndication.com is from adWords ads.

looks like some is promoting your site using adwords.

Originally Posted by mediba

I've advertised with adwords in the past,

hummm. time to check if your old Adwords account is really dead.

[arcon5]

Do you offer an affiliate program?

Somebody may be advertising their affiliate links to earn commission (like many do for eBay)...

[mediba]

I do not offer any affiliate bonuses. I have 2 adwords accounts, one is not active anymore (I email google and asked them to terminate it). The other one has all campains paused.

When I looked at the stats a bit closer, I saw that all thoose visitors came in only two hours. I've never even targeted any keywords that got 400 searches / day on google.. This is really strange. I can't find any explanation for it.

Do you guys have any other ideas?

[Micromag]

Originally Posted by mediba

Do you guys have any other ideas?

Maybe...
Someone out there in the world, accidentally set your domain as landing page by mistake in his adWords campaign for a small period and is still crying for the bucks that he lost.

[donny]

Or, someone used FakeZilla.com to use pagead2.googlesyndication.com as it's referral to blast tons of uniques to your site. I don't know. Anything could happen

[toncus]

only two hours
~~~~~~~~~~~~
YES,it seems some poor guy made a mistake on his adword campaign ,and found it 2 hours late.

[bara]

It seems that your ad was aproved for content network and started showing at content pages.

[Micromag]

Originally Posted by bara

It seems that your ad was aproved for content network and started showing at content pages.

lol, it would be a great answer:

But the problem is that he don't has an active adwords account

[greatat8]

i think some must be using some software

[mediba]

I haven't got any more visitors from that refferal since then. So I guess it will remain to be a mystery. I got a strange domain-name, so it couldn't be that anyone misstyped it in their adwords campaign. Maybe it was someone why had a few bucks left on their adwords account and decided to be nice to me

[shorebreak]

I run political, social or environmentally-themed campaigns from time to time and almost always send the Adwords traffic to a site I have no affiliation with. I'm sure this happens very little in the commercial world, but it does happen.

-Shorebreak

[Tara33]

Originally Posted by mediba

I do not offer any affiliate bonuses. I have 2 adwords accounts, one is not active anymore (I email google and asked them to terminate it). The other one has all campains paused.

When I looked at the stats a bit closer, I saw that all thoose visitors came in only two hours. I've never even targeted any keywords that got 400 searches / day on google.. This is really strange. I can't find any explanation for it.

Do you guys have any other ideas?

In your stats, where it says "pagead2.google...", look for the web site address (it should be within the long string of text), where the ad is displayed. Visit that web site. Do any of your old ads show up on the pages where the visitors entered from?