Hi, I have a serious problem.. got a notification from Google about invalid clicks and went to check what is happening. This is what I found : Since 14th Feb. Adsense report shows that my page impressions went up 20% - 100% (from usual 8000/10000 to 11000/21000) and all of those additional impressions generated Adsense clicks ! My CTR skyrocketed at 20%-60%. It definitely looks like a bot or something so I went to check my server logs.. and surprise ! Nothing's changed ! I don't see any special movement, just a regular traffic ! Google Analytics as well, GA data is coresponding to server logs - no change in traffic ! Ok, sorry guys.. just noticed this in server logs.. now I only need to track this bot down.. Please, can someone tell me what is happening ? Did you have similar problems ? I took Adsense down cause I don't want to be banned or let some stupid spammers generate false costs for advertisers but I really need it back .. Can someone help me ? Thanks, Andrzej
It's good that you took adsense down for the time being. Send a copy of your log reports to Google to support your claim. Good luck!
if he used channels or not wouldint matter if a malicious user stole his pub-id. being one of adsense's biggest vulnerabilities anyone can take your pub-id and include it into adsense generated code and voila.
I received a similar e-mail reporting invalid impressions and immediately removed all AdSense code from my site. After contacting Google a few times I managed to identify the offending referrer and blocked it. When I started re-posting the AdSense code I swapped in brand new channels to guarantee that all impressions were appearing on the new channels and not on the old ones. For testing purposes I assume that if all your AdSense code is in at least one channel and you see impressions turning up without a channel (or in a channel that's no longer active) it may signify a hijacked pub-id or code block. Cached versions of your pages might still cause small numbers of hits to old channels but over time they'd fall away. I have no way of guaranteeing that this is an accurate gauge - it just seems to be a logical method of checking for a hijacked id.
Be interesting to see what google says when you show them the logs. Good luck either way. Big question is why. If they add his code to a bot they do not make any money. Only other answer is they are trying to drive cost up for advertisers they compete against.