IP addresses of clickthroughs

[Ally_Cat]

First post in this forum! :)

I'm analyzing our logs and the data of a PPC engine to determine whether some unusal traffic we received is fraudulent or not. The problem I'm running into is that a large percentage of the IP addresses the PPC engine is listing as charged clicks don't even show up in my server logs. What could cause this? Is it possible that the PPC engine and our site are logging different IP addresses for the same person, and if so, how do I get around that for tracking purposes?

Thanks in advance!

[sugarkane]

Hey, welcome to this forum Ally_cat ;)

One possible reason is ISP caching, as mnorton says here [webmasterworld.com]

[Netizen]

Do you have daily log files or longer? If they are daily there is the possibility that the time being reported by the PPC site for a click is from a completely different time zone from where your site is hosted and therefore the times can be off by any number of hours (up to 23, I guess)

[Ally_Cat]

Fortunately and unfortunately our logs aren't daily at this point. The log I'm currently working from contains over a months worth of traffic, so that isn't the issue. ISP caching certainly makes sense in this case. Thanks for you suggestions! :)

[onlineleben]

Hi Ally,
you could integrate a little script into your landing page to log data about referer, ip-address, date/time like I mentioned in the thread listed below.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Works for me, but I do not have that much traffic from PPC.

[joshuaip]

Additionally if your site has slow responses the query may not have been made from your server but was tracked on the front end. (that is in overtures user information)