Unusually high CTR today

[virtualreality]

Hello, I have unusual high CTR today. It is 4% and usually I have 1.6%. I tried to investigate in my reports and it seems the clicks occur on my text ads from both US and France. Should I be concerned my CTR has gone up so suddenly? What should I do?

[ember]

[webmasterworld.com...]

Middle of the page.

[virtualreality]

What I find strange is that text ads are mainly clicked not banner ads. How can a bot knows what a text ad is and what a banner ad is?

[virtualreality]

I contacted my host regarding this and this is what they replied:

"Upon viewing the server, I did not see any type of load concerns for today; however, I did find quite a few results relating to bots and crawlers viewing the domain. There are 45,509 requests on your site today alone and I did not see a crawl-delay setup within the robots.txt file to limit the number of requests the crawlers can make to the domain. I can setup a crawl-delay to limit the requests to a time-frame; I would recommend at least 5 seconds when implementing this feature. Please let me know if you would like this enabled or have any additional questions."

Do you think setting up a crawl-delay to limit the requests to a time-frame is a good idea for SEO? Can that affect organic search ranking?

[dolcevita]

Interesting but i see same by my account. And it is not only related to one site but almost to 3 other site hosted on other servers by another hosting company

Strange is that not only CTR but also Page RPM and CPC are almost double higher than usually.

I've to blocked all Amazonaws IP ranges but not any changes at all. I see Page CTR all times rising.

btw

It seems not only to related to my account - [webmasterworld.com...]

[Swanny007]

I have one ad unit with an unusually high CTR & earnings, just today... something is up, if it is widespread I would think Google will notice and make corrections.

[hurricane sh]

It's happening to my sites too, my earning today is 6 times higher than usual. I've never seen 2-times higher spike before, something is wrong.

[abbye]

I created a account to reply to this. I was freaking out thinking someone is trying to click bomb me but I notice also the HIGH ctr is from US and France. I get way to much traffic to figure out who is doing it. Also it isn't a rush of clicks it's increased slowly all day on the 19th and going in to the 20th the clicks are still going up slowly more than normal.

[glitterball]

Still continuing for me today too - weird that the cost per click is more than double the usual amount. How can Google be serving more expensive ads to a bot?

[extremist]

same here. ctr = %80

[Whoa]

same for me...xlhost.com seems to be the source. Just submitted a report to Google.

[dethfire]

dang, I was hoping this was legit. My CTR is unusually high as well

[illusionist]

Same here! Wth is going on! I have 10.67% on one of my site, Any of you on cloudflare?

[wa desert rat]

I just reported possible click fraud to my major site. CTR is unusually high but traffic and pageviews are not high enough to justify that CTR. So I suspect there is a new scheme afoot and Google is busily trying to solve it.

They're pretty stupid to launch such a massive clickfraud campaign because it's unlikely to slip under the radar. And so suddenly (it began yesterday for me - April 19, 2015 and is still continuing today).

WDR

[adamxcl]

Same for me. Two URL channels way up starting on the 19th, from 1.4% average jumping up to 4.5%

Another channel from 1% to 61% so something is up, up to 100% today. Fraud for someone out there and it appears big if so many are seeing it here.

A week or so ago, I changed one of these channels to mobile adsense blocks and when it started, I thought it was that little bump at first but then it got out of hand so I know it's click bomb of some kind.

[tidewatcher]

I found this via Google News: "Click Through Rates (CTR) Surge For Some Google AdSense Publishers"
[seroundtable.com...]

[netmeg]

How can a bot knows what a text ad is and what a banner ad is?

Bot don't care. Bot looks for AdSense javascript, and executes a click.

[wa desert rat]

CTR and revenue growth back to normal over the last 30 minutes so it's possible that Google has figured out what's up and stopped it. Still watching it closely.

WDR

[paparoysan]

same for me, one of my sites gone up 150% in earnings since yesterday..at one point it was 36% CTR..it seems it is calming in last couple of hours..i submitted click fraud report to google..

[surfgatinho]

I'm getting this. What is weird is the pages getting hit are blocked by robots.txt and I'm not sure how they are being discovered.

That aside, the main culprit appears to be from xlhosts

[netmeg]

First of all, robots.txt only prevents crawling, and second of all, badly behaved bots don't give a rap about robots.txt - they ignore it.

[ember]

Things seem to be slowly returning to normal. I'm not sure if it will last, but maybe Google is getting a handle on the problem. They certainly have to be aware of it.

When this happened almost exactly a year ago, I thought my account might be banned. Now I've learned to accept that this happens. When the issue is this widespread, then I am not that worried. It's a Google issue, and they will fix it.

[wa desert rat]

It's interesting that it began on a Sunday when, presumably, the Google clickfraud team might have fewer experts at work. It seems to be hitting sites world wide.

If this is all from xlhosts then I would assume their bandwidth costs are going to be much greater than they might have anticipated.

WDR

[martinibuster]

Those of you with high CTR, is your site mobile friendly?

[adamxcl]

My site is mobile friendly.

When this happened to me some time last year, it was on a weekend as well. The surge happened, then it died down, then one more surge (like they adjusted for counter measures) and then died down again (maybe Google caught by then).

[ember]

Not mobile friendly (although working on getting there).

[ken_b]

Those of you with high CTR, is your site mobile friendly?

Yes

[martinibuster]

There are reports that Google is testing the mobile-only algorithm and causing traffic spikes. I'm wondering if this might be what some are experiencing.

Interesting that ember's site is not currently mobile friendly but received a spike.

[Swanny007]

So I initially thought it was one ad unit that was being click-bombed yesterday, it turns out it was happening on a number of my sites. They have all returned to normal today except for one. So I'm going to block more IPs on that site and call it good. I'd say Google is very aware of the issue now and fixed it mostly.

[alika]

testing the mobile-only algorithm and causing traffic spikes

The Adsense spike is not accompanied by traffic spike in my case