Multiple clicking visitors

Having it every day.

[Monus]

I am tracking my adsense clicks with a script and have notice visitors clicking multiple times on the same ad.
Some records from one of the visitors looks like this:

Date - IP - Site Page - Ad Url
2004-04-23 18:48:52 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com
2004-04-23 18:48:52 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com
2004-04-23 18:48:51 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com
2004-04-23 18:48:51 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com
2004-04-23 18:48:51 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com
2004-04-23 18:48:51 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com
2004-04-23 18:48:51 - 123.123.123.123 - [example.com...] - www.example.com

This visitor have been clicking on the ad for more than 20 times in 5 sec.

1. Can this get me in problems? ASA?
2. Are other webmasters having the same problem?
3. Who are this guys?

[jomaxx]

This sort of thing is quite normal, as a one-off. Maybe the advertiser's site is not responding, or you've got an impatient user on a dial-up connection.

But if the same IP address or IP block shows up day after day, you might want to do a tracert to see where the clicks are coming from, and consider denying access to your site from that address.

[bernis]

my tracking script (the one from adsensetracker) registers three clicks (usually in single second) when i right click the ad to see advertiser's url. so there is a chance that those 6 records are not even single click, only two right-clicks

[surfer67]

This visitor have been clicking on the ad for more than 20 times in 5 sec.

Not possible for someone to click an adsense ad 20 times in 5 seconds. My guess is that it's a search engine spider.

[Monus]

The site where it happens is a directory site, the page in this example get only trafic from users that search for the domain name (1/5 from the trafic is yahoo searches for domainnames). In many cases (2/3 seconds between the clicks) it can be a impatient user or a not responding Google/Advertiser but 5 clicks in one second how impatient can you be.

[jomaxx]

Sure it's possible for someone to click 20 times in five seconds. It could conceivably be a spider of some kind, but it's unlikely and it wouldn't be a search engine spider. They won't click AdSense ads, and they won't generate the onThis or onThat Javascript events that you're probably using for tracking.

In any case, I'm reasonably sure that multiple-clicks-per-second would be filtered out before charging the advertiser, and it must be fairly low on AdSense's watch list. Unless, as I said, there's a pattern of this happening again and again on a publisher's site.

[edited by: jomaxx at 9:52 pm (utc) on April 23, 2004]

[Monus]

Not possible for someone to click an adsense ad 20 times in 5 seconds. My guess is that it's a search engine spider.

Yes, you can click more than 5 times in a sec. And the most IPs are from ISPs, comming from all parts of the world.

[surfer67]

Sure it's possible for someone to click 20 times in five seconds

But Adsense doesn't open a new browser window when you click an ad. The "clicker" would have to come back each time and click again, and again, ... 20 times..

[jomaxx]

No, the scenario is that if the advertiser's site doesn't respond in a timely fashion, a bored user may click & click & click waiting for a response.

[varya]

I played around with this (not with adsense links). I discovered that if I repeatedly click a link, it just causes the browser window to refresh very rapidly, and I don't go anywhere until I stop clicking.