anyone ever see this url show up in their website stats?

[ownerrim]

[pagead2.googlesyndication.com...]

never saw it in my list of url references before yesterday and it seemed to be coincidental with a lot of adsensebot activity

[Sierra_Dad]

That is the referer if you have AdWords showing on a content network.

If you don't, is someone else advertising your site?

[ownerrim]

sierra_dad

that's kind of what I thought it was.

But I am not an advertiser. I simply
carry adsense on one of my sites.

So...why is this showing up as a referrer
on my website statistics...?

[ownerrim]

advertising my site?

[2mymall]

In your Adsense account, there is a place for you to add your own advertisements, in case Adsense has no adverts to display. You do this by uploading a '.html' file to your server. Add this file to your Adsense account and they will display this, when there are no ads to display.

[ownerrim]

2mymall,

Nope, I've never done the alternate ad thing. So, I don't have a clue what's going on. I've sent an email to adsense tech support asking if they can make me a little less clueless on this one.

[Alioc]

In this case the referrer would be the alternative html page, not googlesyndication.com

[ownerrim]

alioc, like I said, there is no alternative .html page

[ownerrim]

is it possible that this is some of test, or something?

[Sierra_Dad]

Whoever may be advertising your site may be not here or not saying.

If there is a Google ad out on you, there could be some referrals from Google out as well. It is not easy to tell in my experience a referal from search results from a referral from sponsored ads next to the search results - maybe that has changed.

You could try some of your top referring keywords and see if an ad for your site comes up in Google.

[elsewhen]

just guessing... google just released site-targeting. when an advertiser starts a new campaign, google will suggest different domains that might be relavent. the URLs that google suggests are clickable. i am not sure what the referrer would be if the advertiser clicked to check out your site. perhaps it explains what you are seeing, since the timing seems to line up.

[bakedjake]

Fake referrer to throw you for a loop. See it all the time.

[Dave_B]

I have had this a few times. I tossed it up to an advertiser checking referrers. I have never had an adwords account so I do not know if it is possible, but it got me over it so I could get back to work ;)

Dave

[novice]

It's also posible that an advertiser put the wrong destination URL (wrong tld, mispelling..) in their ad and had a few clicks before they caught it.

[ownerrim]

Thanks for all the input, guys. I guess I won't lose any sleep over it. Not tonight, at least. (last night, I have to admit, I had this weird feeling go down the back of my spine).