Click Fraud Attempts?

What does it look like?

[naitsirhc26]

How do you tell when someone is doing click fraud on your site?

Today I logged in and found a page of mine had 17 impressions, and 18 clicks! That doesn't seem right. I do have two ad banners, so maybe someone was looking at all of the ads? It just looks a little fishy.

Would this be a sign of click fraud, and how do you even protect against it?

(I will do some searching in the past posts)

Thanks,

Christian

[WiseWebDude]

Good question, I have wondered that as well. I know they have some tools out there, but I've heard they don't work all that well so I haven't pursued them. I actually do that at times, if I am really looking at something really hard...to buy or whatever, I might see some ads and then go through each one that looks good...I hold control down and click so it pops up in a new window...if I don't like that one, I close the page and then control click on another one...that could be what happened here.

[ronburk]

The amateur fraud should be obvious by inspection. Unusual volume focused on a minority of pages. Repeat traffic from the same IP address or same subnet. Ask your web analysis software for traffic sorted by IP address (or, preferably, subnet since that will be equivalent for most small sites and non-fraud traffic). Look at the top few sources and see if they are fishy.

Probably the best thing you can do is read a simple stats tutorial and learn what the standard variance of your key statistics are, so you don't get into a tizzy over "unusual" numbers that are actually well within 2 standard deviations of normal for your website. See the recurring threads of the form "My Traffic/Clicks/Earnings Have Plunged Today!" for good examples of folks who have no idea how much variance is in their numbers normally.

[martinibuster]

Today I logged in and found a page of mine had 17 impressions, and 18 clicks! That doesn't seem right.

That's not unusual. Happens frequently. It only becomes visible when you have low impressions, such as you are experiencing. Not a problem to worry about.

[naitsirhc26]

Thank you for all of the info. I will look into getting better about using my statistics, etc...I am getting a new stats program today, by the way.

WiseWebDude, yes, I have done that before as well. Pressing Ctrl and clicking on a bunch of ad links to see if one matches what I am looking for.

Thank again!

Christian

[benallos]

I have that click attack problem and it started last August 30. It is attacking not only one site of mine but most of my sites. The logger that I have installed cannot detect this attacks and I suspect that it is somewhat a clickbot. So what I did is analyze the logs of the sites that the attack came from.

When I discovered there is something that is not right, well of course I investigated the issue and reported it to G. I get all the possible ip addresses that I suspected where the attacks came from and emailed this to G. G has responded that they have noted my concern and and will check my account for any suspicious activity.

The attack is random, not the same time and using different ip addresses and came from different countries. Until now the attack is still going on, and I keep on filtering the ip addresses so that it could nod access my sites. The logger that I use is useless. If only there is a program out there where or adsense logger that could help me solve this problem of click attacks.

[testing0]

there are 2 diffrent kind of idea about this issue.

1- those who think let google take care of the click fraud as they have better tool.

2- those who think no let us prevent it because usualy when google find out about such activities on small fishes they immediately kill the fish and don't bother about baning some ip etc..

there are some tools like adlogger and asrep etc.. but they not accurate and usualy not working after latest adsense update.