Am I experiencing click fraud?

[numnum]

In checking my midday Adsense results today, I noticed one particular Adlink (I've assigned a channel just to that ad) has way too many page impressions -- by a factor of 10 or so (10 times too many) -- compared with other ads on the same pages. The click rate on that ad is way above average (also by a factor of about 10, from 0.4% average to about 4.0%), and of course the revenue is way off the scale. It's my top-performing channel today, outperforming all other ads on my site put together, which is how I noticed this in the first place.

I wonder if someone has copied my pub-id # and ad slot number into another site -- I do have many upstart competitors in other countries (especially India). Blekko wouldn't show that to me yet, of course, since it is occurring this morning for the first time.

Or is it possible this is the result of some sort of temporary glitch in Google's channel reporting? Has anyone else experienced this sort of thing and drawn a firm conclusion?

[Freedom]

10x the normal amount is a lot, doesn't sound like a google dump to me. It does sound like you had someone copy your ad, possibly your whole content and the ad went with it.

IMO - Change the adlink to the ugliest colors imaginable, and replace your old with a new one, and see what happens.

[ThatsBoBo]

Turn on Allowed Sites and make sure only your domains are listed under it.

Select option: Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account

and add your URLs.

[numnum]

Thanks for the input.

@Freedom: Right, probably not a general click dump because the spike in impressions was for just one of many ad slots.

The number of impressions for that ad exceeded by 10-fold the number of impressions for the pages on which the ad appears! Impressions and clicks for the ad have been back to normal since the morning. My best theory is the pages in one of my subdirectories were scraped overnight (during the day in Asia and the Subcontinent -- I'm in the U.S.) and the scraper accidentally included my Adsense ad for a while on a site that receives very good traffic. After a time -- perhaps a few hours -- he noticed the ad and removed it. In the meantime, the ad enjoyed about 1,000 impressions and about 25 clicks at the alien domain. The end result: I'll enjoy some extra walking-around money for the weekend.

@ThatsBoBo, I've just set Allowed Sites to allow only my domains. It never occurred to me until now that this might become an issue.

[ThatsBoBo]

Yep, everyone should have Allowed Sites set for your domains. I don't understand why it is not a default.

Happy it worked out for you.

[DaStarBuG]

It is not default because a lot of people would AdSense to their sites and forget to add them to the allowed sites list.

[numnum]

I was also wondering why Allowed Sites isn't a default. You make a good point, DaStarBuG. Google prefers that you err on the side of inclusiveness -- as opposed to exclusiveness.

A bit of a digression, but a few hours after I set Allowed Sites my account showed an alert that one or more of my ads had appeared on at least one unauthorized domain within the last week. I clicked to see the list, and only one domain was listed:

translate.googleusercontent.com

Okay, I've looked into what that is, and I've added it to my Allowed Sites list. So I wonder why webcache.googleusercontent.com wasn't listed as well.

[ElvisFan]

Also got the same alert inside my adsense login... however, I only ever had "allowed sites" clicked on
and the site displaying my ads are bing.com and google around several european countries...

How can that happen? As Adsense and Google know more about me than my own mother...