Strange long string of letters and numbers in keywords

Google Analytics

[mslina2002]

I have been seeing strange long string of characters and numbers in GA. Anybody can tell me what this is? I have seen them before but now I am seeing them more and has me baffled...

They look like this:
84a8e0c9506ebaadfda3faf9027e36d222438d4c8d5a824f

[mslina2002]

anybody?

[LorSor]

I've seen similar data in my Urchin stats, but not in my Google Analytics. Additionally, I've seen numbers that mimic html color codes (i.e. 000000, FFFFFF).

To the best of my knowledge, this is some sort of strange snafu where the keywords used from adsense traffic on other sites gets recorded incorrectly.

I could be completely off on this, though. Not sure.

[BradleyT]

We get those long strings of characters as search terms also.

I don't think it's adwords because our ads send visitors to landing pages on another domain.

[webboy1]

Where in Analytics are you seeing this? For instance, Is it being noted as a referrer? Is it being appended to popular content pages?

I've seen similar things before on tracking codes. So I'm wondering, depending on where you are seeing it, if it's simply a reference attached to a link to your site from someone elses.

[LorSor]

Where in Analytics are you seeing this? For instance, Is it being noted as a referrer? Is it being appended to popular content pages?

For us, it's showing up as the keyword.

[BradleyT]

Source seems to be AOL always.

[mslina2002]

For us, it's showing up as the keyword.

0278f9cd726373d18fae5988b846d1ba is what shows up in my keywords and has been hit 28 times. Is it robot activity I wonder...

more keywords ....

632979b747f33ffcd60354e60eb2e1509ca4ae556ee8fa21 n=9
84a8e0c9506ebaadd00fece9beab1c141bc057b0286c34c4 n=9

[LorSor]

Just ran January month end reports and noticed all of my goofy keywords came from Google Syndication. See Below:

googlesyndication.com 154 23.1%
000000 96 14.4%
555555 10 1.5%
other 9 1.3%
444444 8 1.2%
666666 6 0.9%
333333 6 0.9%
ffffff 4 0.6%
e33f5e 4 0.6%
58595b 2 0.3%
000099 1 0.1%
search machine 1 0.1%
424242 1 0.1%
53a0df 1 0.1%
ffbbe8 1 0.1%
50646b 1 0.1%
ff9900 1 0.1%
d7bca5 1 0.1%
00ff00 1 0.1%

Boy, that sure feels like a waste of money spent on AdSense!

[zygots1]

Do you have auto-tagging enabled in Adwords?

When auto-tagging is enabled in Adwords a 'gclid=' parameter with a long alpha/numeric identifier is appended to your destination URL automatically.

I've found that in some cases our Analytics tool will display this query string/gclid value in place of the keyword, for whatever reason.

Also: If you advertise on the Adwords 'Search Network' your ads are distributed to Ask and AOL by Google automatically--this would explain why these strange values appear to be coming from those engines.