Need Help Quick - Ah-Ha Fraudulent Clicks!

[Ally_Cat]

Over and over and over again in my logs:

*.*.*.* - - [08/May/2003:16:19:53 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 302 0 "http://sameurl.com/***/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.02; Windows 98)"

Since we started our ah-ha campaign yesterday, I've got about 50 different IP addresses (as far as I've counted) making this same request over and over and over again. I've blanked out the referring URL, but it is exactly the same in each instance, and until I paused our campaign when I discovered this, our ah-ha ad was showing up on that page.

Sometimes there is a page request also, but not often.

Anyone know what the heck is happening here, and how I go about fixing it?

I started checking the logs when our click-throughs reported by ah-ha were MUCH higher than we had projected.

[MHes]

Hi Allycat

I know little about this area but could the referring url be part of Ah-Ha? Do they funnel all requests through one site but pass on the ip address of the original click through?

I am way out of my depth here but hopefully someone will respond.

[Tropical Island]

Best thing to do is ask Ah-Ha however our experience is that if you suddenly get spikes in traffic for one term on one of these small PPC's then it can be assumed it's either fraud or one of your competitors who doesn't like the idea of another advertiser under the heading.