How do I review logs for suspicious activity?

Adsense support suggested it. What am I looking for?

[expat123]

y site is receiving an unusual increase in clicks in the last few days and my CTR has increased about %35 above a fairly consistent average.

I recently started to re-send a daily newsletter to my sites subscribers over about a 3 month lapse so I think that might explain the increase. I also added another ad-unit to my pages.

In anycase, I notified Google adsense about the increase in activity because it is unusual.

They told me that they recommend I review my site's logs for any suspicious activity and notify them of my findings.

How do I review my logs with an eye towards finding suspicious activity (is there a utility I could use)?

[jchampliaud]

I think the only utility you could use would be one of those third party AdSense trackers as they might track by ip address. Of course that’s to late for you. The only other suggestion I would have is look for out of place ip addresses. Maybe that with an ip address look up tool might give you an idea of what is going on.

[mblair]

It very well may be that your newsletter campaign attracted "new eyeballs" to your ads, encouraging more clicks per average visitor and leading to a higher CTR.

As for checking the logs, I would at least take a look with log analysis software for any trends that look abnormal and merit consideration/review. Look at your normal periods for comparison. In particular you might look for a high number of page views from particular IP addresses, or IP addresses that are similiar.

Also, look to see if you did have a big traffic bump that coincided with the 24 hrs after your newsletter went out.

If you don't have any log analysis software running with your web host there are some you can download that can proccess the logs offline.