Adsense reporting way more ads than page access

Any ideas what else might be causing it?

[MikeNoLastName]

Off and on from about July 12 - 17, a couple of totally unrelated pages on our site suddenly reported (one on a single page URL based chanel and the other on a subdirectory level URL chanel) an astronomical number of impressions, on the order of the total of all the rest of our pages put together. I did the usual check to see if we had suddenly hit #1 on a suddenly popular topic on the SE's and came up with nothing. I finally downloaded the raw logs to see where all these visitors were being referred from and for what terms, and discovered there were only the usual handful of visits to those two pages. One of the pages does have an original photo which happened to be ranked #1 by G in the images section for a rather obscure past celebrity, but that is about it. Any other suggestions of things to check for to figure out if there is a valid reason for so many ad impressions with no actual page loads in the logs? I can't imagine someone who just views the photo via google's image section without even loading the original page could trigger an ad impression could it? Also the increase in impressions unfortunately came without any significant increase in clicks, which drove our usually very consistant CTR to about 1/2 of usual (twice as many impressions reported for same number of clicks). It's like either G is simply overreporting impressions on these two pages or some one person is reloading our page from a cache and thus not clcking the ads (neither is the type of page one would normally tend to monitor and reload frequnetly). Nothing at all tricky being done on either page. Is there some way someone could be serving our page from another server but it shows up as coming from our URL to be counted by G? Any way someone could refresh the ads without refreshing the page? I'm at a loss.
I hate to write to Adsense support in these situations because every time I do, they are rarely helpful or forthcoming with any real solution and then they wind up screwing something up or setting some switch that causes our PPC to drop 20% or more over night and last for months thereafter.

[Atomic]

The same thing happened to me. Hundreds of thousands of page impressions appeared out of nowhere. It almost always happened at about the same time of day so I just started pulling the ads at that time. After a couple months it stopped. This would be about 3 weeks ago.

I investigated by checking my logs and could never find anything out of the ordinary. If I had to guess, based on what I could find, the problem is with Google's reporting which makes you wonder how accurate any of it is.

[ember]

Same thing about three days ago, but it only happened on one site. Checked the logs and everything looked normal, but AdSense impressions were way, way up and I can not see why. Was worrying me but I am glad to see I am not alone.

[bumpski]

Since Google is using an IFrame to display the ads I guess it's truly trivial to use Firefox to fetch a link for one of your ads (Right click Adsense ad, click "This Frame", "Open frame in new tab"). Anybody loads this link and it could show up as hits for your page. The page URL is embedded in the link. If Google isn't checking that the referrer is "your site", then I guess a competitor could be causing Adsense impression counts apparently from your specific pages.

It'd be easy to set up an experiment on a new page. Although I think Google may require an intermediate page be shown before you get another impression count on the given page. I haven't played with any of this, so just guess work.

Added:
Setting the Allowed Sites filter my protect against this. Perhaps Google weakened their security when they implemented the "Allowed Sites" filter.

Edit Added more:
Perhaps the allowed sites filter would eliminate impressions (probably worthless) from things like the Google cache, might help CTR and earnings too, HMM, any opinions? (Don't want to hijack the thread though)

[MikeNoLastName]

Interesting concept, as we HAVE had allowed sites filtered for a long time. Although I didn't think of checking it last week, we had another day on a different page earlier this week. We happen however to "allow" a few "other" sites like images.google, search.msn and search.yahoo, so these are all suspect. I don't recall G ever specifing whether ads appearing on an "un-allowed" page still count toward impressions on our reports, even though we don't get paid for clicks on them.
But thanks for that idea. The next time we see a major jump in impressions, I think we will temporarily turn off the allowed sites filter and see if our CTR keeps pace. If so, it means some legitimate site is framing or otherwise calling our ads.
We have repeatedly pointed out to G that they definitely have a consistent reporting bug on pages using a certain advanced feature which I won't mention, since I'm not sure if it actually is a premium feature or not.

[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 4:39 am (utc) on July 25, 2008]