I have been seeing a steadily increasing number of invalid clicks on my site. Over that past 6 months it's gone from a few clicks to 75% of all clicks. I've been an Adsense publisher with this site for more than 10 years and I've been scrupulous about my Adsense implementation. It's a Dreampress hosted Wordpress blog about projects I've done, all original content written by me.
Looking at Analytics I was able to find 4 pages the were seeing astronomical CTRs. Additionally, these pages were for events long past and of little interest to anyone. The only common denominator is that some were for events in the U.K. which is not the focus of my site.
Turning to my logs I found that all of these clicks were coming from IP addresses within cloud hosting providers. They were also coming from the same, exact, two year old version of Firefox and I used that odd version number to block traffic from what was more than a dozen IPs from all around the globe. Once I blocked the traffic my site CTR has fallen back to it's normal average.
My question is: why would someone do this? I got all excited about the possible return of revenue levels of the past only to have my hopes dashed by what seems a bizarre scheme.
