Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This is not that unusual, sites get hacked regularly.
That led me to thinking that if you check your Adsense earnings daily or even more frequently (among other checks) then you would identify the problem quickly. Recovery would be correspondingly quicker.
Is this an argument against all those "Mr / Mrs Cools" out there who laugh at us who check our stats daily and take immediate note when something happens out of the ordinary?
Check your stats only monthly, as some claim they do, and you could be in real trouble for the long term.
Any thoughts?
Even if you aren't hacked, I've had AdSense targeting totally go south a couple of times and needed Google's assistance to fix it because it had nothing to do with my pages.
Had I only checked once a month, I'd have lost a fortune.
I just have a pop up on my desktop that displays current earnings about every 15 minutes so I can see it's moving forward because anything can go wrong, esp. on a dynamic web site.
Reviewing traffic stats is more meaningful than hanging out in the AdSense CP. The AS CP tells you nothing about what's going on with your site. As incredibill points out, it only tells you what's going on with your ads, which is important but doesn't tell you about WHERE your referrals are coming from or WHAT keywords are being used to access your site, and from WHAT COUNTRY/REGION your visitors are coming from, and what pages are popular today, very imortant site metrics that are more useful for diagnosing what is going on with your AdSense earnings, and a thousand times more useful for keeping tabs on your site.
My site hasn't been hacked but a few server side bugs has cost me income, one time it was 12 hours worth of lost income, it happens.
Having it pop up now and then just to reassure me it's still moving along is very useful.
If I see it hasn't changed in over and hour or so, which isn't normal, I check to see if AdSense login is down, whether something is broken on my site, etc.
I wouldn't live without it just for peace of mind.
I just have a pop up on my desktop that displays current earnings about every 15 minutes
Bill,
Is that tool searchable on Google or your own thingy?
Daily, maybe. I don't know that hourly would help you very much (incrediBILL's experience notwithstanding)
If I were to get broken into, I'd be worrying about a ton of other things before I got to worrying about my AdSense tho. We have various SMS alerts in place for certain types of activity, but we have a network of our own servers; that'd be more difficult through a web hosting company.
Yes, agreed. The point I'm trying to make is, if you're going to be hanging out watching stats, you're going to find more meaningful/useful info in the traffic stats than in the AS CP. So if you have to get obsessive/compulsive about it, the traffic analytics is best. If you are afraid of the site being hacked then subscribe to a monitoring service or simply visit the site.
The person on the discussion referenced by the OP did not have the AdSense ads replaced. There were links placed to pill sites:
[webmasterworld.com...]
A review of the AS CP wouldn't tell you the site was hacked. A review of the traffic stats MIGHT because you can see new rogue pages showing up, or outgoing traffic to sites you never heard of.
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:05 pm (utc) on July 7, 2009]
This thread is asking if watching AdSense stats is a useful tool for detecting sites being hacked.
Is it the best tool? Maybe not, but it's still probably a worthwhile option in a basket of tools. And it probably can't hurt.
Even though checking hourly or several times a day might give a somewhat skewed picture because of unsynced stats, a glaring disruption might well show up as being worth investigating.
If you are afraid of the site being hacked then subscribe to a monitoring service or simply visit the site.
That doesn't cover all your bases exactly:
1. Site monitoring only shows the site is up, not that AdSense is actually earning
2. Traffic monitoring only shows the site is getting traffic, not that AdSense is actually earning
3. Even site monitoring of HTML to verify your PUB-ID is in the page could fail because the hacker could've commented your code out in javascript and included his own just to make sure he didn't set off any alarms.
4. Only monitoring ADSENSE shows that ADSENSE is actually earning because even proving AdSense is alive on your site using monitors doesn't mean it's displaying real ads, it could be displaying PSAs.
All I know is AdSense monitoring has saved my bacon multiple times.
'Nuff said
This thread is asking if watching AdSense stats is a useful tool for detecting sites being hacked.
Only if they removed your AdSense or alter your page with inserted SEO links (very widespread) to all sorts of off topic garbage and malware sites that triggers PSAs to be displayed.
I would recommend site monitoring that supplies full page HTML comparison if you're really worried about hackers.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 9:10 pm (utc) on July 7, 2009]
The point I'm trying to make is, if you're going to be hanging out watching stats, you're going to find more meaningful/useful info in the traffic stats than in the AS CP. So if you have to get obsessive/compulsive about it, the traffic analytics is best.
True. I finally linked my AdSense account with Google Analytics and I'm amazed at how much I've learned about my site.
For example, I have a page that ranks up there with the other decent earners on my site. So in the AdSense CP it looks just like any other good-performing page. But when I looked at the stats in Analytics, I can see that the page is leaking traffic like water through a sieve. Too much outgoing traffic is headed to a non-paying link (a few dozen clicks per day). I looked at my page and found the reason - the link is prominently placed front and center on the page. That link goes to an AdWords advertiser, and their ads appear on the same page! Hmmm.... guess I gotta "fix" their non-paying link by pushing it down lower on the page.
Meanwhile, this caused me to look at the page in general, and I think I can break it into no less than 4-5 separate pages. I usually get good results by breaking a large page into smaller ones.
Currently I'm looking about 5 times per day, mainly out of curiosity.
Some time during 2007 I lost a lot of interest in working on my site and it ran on auto-pilot for about a year and a half. During that time I still tried to check stats once per day. It was like this... log into AdSense, see a dollar sign followed by some number and that assured me it was working. During that time I went as long a week without checking but that was dumb because if it was down during that time it would have cost a few hundred dollars in lost revenue.
Monday, best day, earnings at mid day will be about a quarter of the total day's earnings. Almost guaranteed. If I see it differs from that significantly then I'm interested, very interested.
I've never been hacked yet (touch wood, fingers and toes crossed as well), but if the was, I'm sure the earnings would drop. Even if the Adsense code remained in tact, a drop in the SERPS would give a corresponding drop in revenue.
I suppose it depends how stable and predictable your earnings are as to whether it's worth checking daily or hourly or have that popup which Incredibill mentioned. How do you do that Incredibill?
As for checking other stats, I know I should, but that long file of gobledegook that is the log file scares the life out of me. I've only ever looked at it on startup sites when the volume of entries is more manageable.
how do you do the pop up
