CTR going through the roof

Worried about fraud detection

[KakenBetaal]

I've recently dropped adsense ads from my forums and run them only on the website itself (They used to be on both). I also changed the ad to a leaderboard and made the colours almost the exact same scheme as the rest of my page.

Now my CTR has gone through the roof - last month an average of <snip>, this month it's been <snip> today. I'm scared, should I be?

[edited by: Jenstar at 11:02 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] edited at KakenBetaal's request [/edit]

[richmondsteve]

I wouldn't worry. AdSense typically performs poorly on forums and leaderboards tend to perform better than banners (which is what I assume you used before). Your current CTR is not what I'd consider high, though there's no universal high/low CTR. Considering my experience with fraud detection systems and the likelihood Google's is much more advanced than anything I've touched I wouldn't be concerned. I doubt it would happen, but even if the increased CTR flagged your site for review unless there's actually something fraudulent taking place I wouldn't expect that they'd contact you.

[Macro]

I'm with richmondsteve. Even a sudden jump in impressions doesn't panic Google :-) . There have been sites that got mentioned on big news sites and suddenly saw their traffic jump 100 fold but without running into any Adsense problems.

I wouldn't worry. You aren't supposed to disclose CTR figures but those figures are well within what some content sites get on a regular basis. Whether it's on par for your industry and your type of content/layout etc I wouldn't be able to tell you.

[conroy]

Dropping the ads on a forum = much higher ctr. But it also means less impressions.

[loanuniverse]

If it would ease your mind, I think installing one of the third-party tracking scripts being developed here would help you find out if there is anybody clicking non-stop on the ads.

BTW, I also think that the fact that the ads are no longer in the forums, that you changed size and colors could be behind it.

[KakenBetaal]

I think that's whats behind it too, but that much of an increase in CTR is waaaay more than I thought possible or even reasonable. Thanks anyway, it's good to hear that it's not as far out of the realms of possibility as I thought.

[jonknee]

Google will be happy. Less work for their servers (less impressions).