Sharp change in CTR

Will I activate the alarm over there at Googleplex?

[ChrisKud5]

In the past couple of days, I have added Google AdSense ads to ALL my pages (minus the search engine results pages where they are not allowed for met yet). I saw a heavy rise in number of clicks, and result a rise in CTR and earnings. Today things have settled down quite a bit (at least as of 1pm CST), with CTR rates at about 1/4 of the past few days.

Any takes on how this will be seen by Google? I am certainly not participating in any kind of fraudulent click scheme; I am a firm believer that Google is a little smarter than I am :).

From log files is looks as though not one single IP was lagging around to much and making many clicks. The highest occurring IP in my Logs was an AOL router which visited about 5 times during the day, which is certainly possible since AOL loves change IP on people every 5 seconds...............

I hope this change won't be seen as a negative on Googles side, and I won't get "the email" about something going on.

[richmondsteve]

From log files is looks as though not one single IP was lagging around to much and making many clicks

You probably mean no single IP generated many impressions on your site. AdSense clicks won't generate anything logged on your server so you wouldn't be able to detect a user who has your page loaded and continually right-clicks AdSense ads to open in a new window. I'm not suggesting that your unusually high statistics are the result of anything fraudulent, but it's a possibility that it's the result of the scenario I described or some sort of attack from a large number of IPs.

It's also possible that the high CTR is simply a result of click curisoity due to the newness of the ads on your site. If you have a lot of repeat visitors that could explain the sudden high CTR after you added AdSense to pages followed by a sharp decline. It could also have to do with the cold front pushing east across the US.

[ChrisKud5]

I do log exit pages on my site (gotta love the power of scripting), and a sharp rise in overall exit pages has shown me over the many months an increase in clicks. Of course it is not a true science, but a very very general trend i have noticed. I do NOT mean what you said, I mean what I said, that my records do not show any specific IP screwing around on any page, followed by an exit on that same page, from the same IP (on the days with higher # of clicks). I could care less about page impressions, I'm not paid based on page impressions.

It very well could be repeat users getting a little curious at the new ads, but that was not my question in the first place.

I have recieved a "your account is in good standing" email from google, so i guess no flags were raised.