Hi everyone, I'm having something weird going on with one of my sites. The CTR is normally pretty good (around 5-10%), but on Tuesday I had only 26 page impressions and 37 clicks! This lead to a CTR of well over 100%. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, or the page impressions were off. But today it looks like it's happening again (so far only 20 impressions but 11 clicks!) I've heard rumors of competitors trying to "sabotage" other sites by clicking multiple times -- do you think this could be what is happening? Is there any way to stop this? Should I contact Google? Or am I just being paranoid? Thanks in advance for your help! Liz
CTR above 10% is suspicious. CTR above 100% will definitely be flagged. I am not sure if someone is purposely sabotaging your account, or if you found one reader who was really, really, really interested in clicking all the Google ads.
Thanks so much for the reply! That's what I was afraid of... Do you think it would do any good to contact Google about it? Can they tell if it's the same person (from IP maybe?) and discount the clicks? I'm just nervous -- I've heard of accounts being banned, and just don't want that to happen to me!
Maybe you should contact Google and openly tell them your concern. I had some weird stuff going on some time ago and contact them basically to ask whether everything was ok because the stats showed funny data. They replied and said it was fine and appreciated that I pointed it out... must be something wrong with the stats.
As long as you aren't the one clicking all of the ads you should be fine. I have had one or two days where I got way over 100% and google never did anything.
As said above, unless you are the one clicking the ads, or it continues for a week or more, then don't worry. It might be an anomaly in the algorithm, or it might be a malicious user. Google will contact you to discuss it if something is of concern for them.