I am seeing very unusual CTR today on several of my pages that do not normally have high numbers. The number of impressions see about par but the clicks are much higher than normal. As they are all on the same domain or subdomains of one site, I would like to ensure I don't have a disgruntled competitor or a mere punk trying to sabotage my site, an advertiser or GoogleAds in general. My delima is whether or not to go ahead and send an email to Google to check it out or wait to see if the CTR continues. Thoughts, suggestions, advice? Thanks.
Thanks Rob ... I had started to email Google but then starting second-guessing the decision. Provided everything is above board, I will celebrate as this will turn-out to be my best day yet since running Google AS for nearly a year. Thanks. ®ob
You're too paranoid. Maybe your traffic has just increased. At one point the CTR for one of my sites shot up by about 5%. I was shocked, was wondering if I was the target of sabotage, until I took a look at the impressions and realized Google had done something and my site was now getting a massive overload of hits, which translated into newbies not knowing what those Adsense ads were and clicking. Nice!
Hi maitrey - welcome to DigitalPoint. Thanks for the reply. I've seen flucuations before, but never like this. However, I'm also noticing more $ per clicks, so it could also be the result of a new, aggressive AdWords campaign by an advertiser.
I noticed the same thing two days ago, insanely high number of clicks compared to usual (but the earnings didn't reflect it) reported by Google but not in my local server stats... it was very very strange.
I'd condisered that too jackburton, but my traffic has not changed that drastically. The number of impressions is about par, it's just the CTR that looked way high. Also, as I said above, the $ per clicks seems to be going for more today too ... maybe smart pricing is working FOR me for today Ironically, my traffic had some nice spikes earlier in the month which did lead to some nice earnings, but the CTR remained average; a little different story today. C'est la vie ... ride it out and be happy, huh?! Thanks.
I don't think you should be too concerned. I'm assuming that you have waited until the end of the day to check the stats. Sometimes during the day the Adsense stats do weird things, but at the end it evens out. If everything is above board Google won't easily ban you, and in the VERY VERY rare case that they do (highly doubtful), it should be easy for you to get your account reinstated.
Urgh, one of the things I hate most about Adsense -- they refuse to tell you what that $2 click you just got was. ARRRGH. Stupid Adsense. If they told me what it was that generated the $2 click, I'd create more sites just for that keyword, and we'd both be rolling in the dough.
I would check you logs to see where the people are coming from. If it is someone trying to sabotage you, then you can block the person.