RonS - 4:55 am on Apr 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

Yup... another "My CTR is down" thread... sort of.

I have one site where I have a fairly small amount of traffic, around 100 uniques per day, but my CTR is consitently in the 25% range, moving around from 20% to 30% daily.

Yesterday the CTR was less than 1%. My tracking software confirms it. 1 click.

Midday when I noticed this channel's low production, I checked the site quickly and saw ads appearing. Usually when this site isn't producing (usually happens once every 5 or 6 weeks) I am getting PSAs. Nope, not this time.

So this evening, I went back and looked just a little bit more closely.

Let me tell you briefly about the site. It's a very small niche site of a certain type of widget. There are many brands of this widget. The site has one page of each brand of widget. Normally, the ads appearing on each page are targeted to that brand of widget. Perfect.

Well, the targetting is so off, that the wrong brand of ads are showing up on each page. So a page about A widgets shows ads about B widgets, hence, no clicks.

I was discussing this with a partner, and it dawned on me... If I were G, how would I check for click fraud? Purposely mistarget a particular site, and see what happens to CTR. If it doesn't decline, then it's probably not a product-interested human and maybe not a human at all doing the clicking.

My other sites are showing no signs of weakness. Just this site, referrals are normal, hitting the same keywords in the same proportion...

Am I going mad or is this a possibility. Or both?