traffic jump means trouble

is this a hijack? Can't figure it out

[dibbern2]

A very minor niche of mine that has been under development for 6 months has been generating a little AS earnings from a very flat pattern of only 100 visits/day. It has never fluctuated more than about 5%.

Suddenly today my earnings jumped by a factor of several 1000%, and in checking my Analytics account, see traffc has jumped up to 500 visits and will probably climb some more yet today.

I was pleased, thinking I had picked up an advantagous link on a good website somewhere in my niche... until I looked at my referral records.

If Analytics can be believed, both my traffic and my AS clicks are being generated by mail campaigns not under my control. A big chunk is from mail-dot-aol, another from a campaign reference at ConstantContact, and then lots of small hits from mail urls at yahoo, MSN, Verizon, and the like.

I'm worried. Is this a hijacking of some sort?

Thanks in advance for any advice given.

[netmeg]

Maybe someone linked to you in a newsletter? As long as your AdSense pub ID isn't in the email, it's probably okay.

[Jane_Doe]

When I get weird traffic spikes like that, I take Adsense off the pages in question until I understand the source better. Better to lose a few days income on one site than my whole Adsense account forever.

Sometimes the spike is from spammy sites for unclear reasons, at least unclear to me. In those cases I block traffic from the spam URLs. Your case is a bit harder to analyze when the traffic is from emails.

For my sites, as Netmeg mentioned, usually traffic from lots of emails means a link in a newsletter. Have you written any syndicated articles for your site? Sometimes people with mailing lists will use syndicated articles in their newsletters which go out to hundreds or maybe thousands of various email addresses.

[dibbern2]

Thank you Jane and Netmeg.

I'm wondering too if it might be an email newsletter. And in response to Jane: no article. Its one page out of 20 thats getting all the play, and that page is a regional directory. It doesn't make sense to me why someone would include a link to a directory in their newsletter, but then, who knows?

I pulled AdSense off that page. It was getting a CTR of almost 50% for an impressions total of about 500. Seemed very unnatural.

I've checked my logs, but there is really little one can trace when the visitor data just refers back to an email page or a generic email campaign reference at ConstantContact. At least, in my limited experience that's the case.

Thanks again.