Click attack?

Or strange reporting error?

[wrgvt]

When I looked at my AdSense reports this morning, it looked like a usual weekday morning report. When I checked back this afternoon, one of my sites had very strange numbers. It's not a very busy site, it had only about 200 impressions. But it has almost 2800 clicks for a 1,456.77% CTR.

Looking at my site, there's nothing unusual in my traffic today. So the impressions looks about right. The total income from those clicks looks about right too. I'm aware that different stats categories in AdSense update at different times. What I don't understand, is that if someone clicks an AdSense ad, they leave my site. If they click the Back key in their browser and come back to my site, shouldn't that be another impression? Shouldn't clicks be less than impressions?

I e-mailed Google and pulled the ads from that site. Actually, I just renamed the include file with the AdSense code so it won't display the ads.

Anyone else seeing anything strange today?

[joelgreen]

Had the same some time ago. Reported to Google as soon as noticed.

[tallguy]

Stats have been updating little slow today

[joelgreen]

If they click the Back key in their browser and come back to my site, shouldn't that be another impression?

Depends on caching. Usually cached by browser page is shown when user clicks back button (so additional impression is not counted).

Shouldn't clicks be less than impressions?

Not always. Sometimes clicks dump at the morning screw it up. You can see more clicks than impressions (or even clicks with zero impression) when AdSense day starts.

However I doubt 2800 clicks could be dumped. It really looks very suspicious.

[wrgvt]

I got an e-mail reply from Google saying basically thanks for letting us know, we'll continue to monitor your situation closely, we can't tell much more than that, and we may have to adjust your earnings for the day if necessary.

Although my total earnings for the day were normal. I don't think I was ever credited with any earnings for those 2800 clicks, so their anti-fraud filter must have caught them right away.

Now I have to figure out when I can turns those ads on again.