Concerned over huge surge in earnings

Fraudulent?

[cyberfyber]

Hello, I’m concerned over fraudulent activity affecting my adsense earnings (as in too much).
Does $56 for a mere 30 clicks sound reasonable?
My Impression RPM jumped up to $8 today and yesterday. It's usually been betw. $1.30 and $2.60
CPC Bids for today are at $57 and above.

Honestly, not that I’ve ever glanced at these sorts of numbers prior to this week and not that I entirely understand it all.
Was happy knowing that Google was fine with my site and that fraudulent activity had stayed at and around a couple percent or lower.

My worries stem from having spent well over a year dealing with this sort of thing wherein fraudulent clicks were reaching as much 90+%. I took care of that by blocking IP blocks I suspected and making use of bad bot plugins (wordpress site).

Things have been great since the beginning of this year. But now, here I am in August concerned over what I’ve seen this past week.
Stinks that one has to wait until the end of every month to see how much invalid traffic one’s gotten.

Final note: Had installed a new theme just prior to the beginning of this. Don’t know if that means that my old theme was keeping my earnings down or that this new theme is screwing things up somehow.

Would appreciate any enlightenment / direction.

Thanks!

[NickMNS]

It is not unusual to get an occasional high value click, with the scale of the numbers you are describing a single click would be sufficient. If it is only one or two clicks, then there is no real reason to be worried, if they are not valid Adsense will claw it back.

Final note: Had installed a new theme just prior to the beginning of this.

But this statement to me is far more concerning. What is your CTR now and what was it before the new install? If your increase in revenue is the result of in increased CTR then the theme is likely the source of the change. Whereas, if your are simply earning more per click then there is likely nothing to worry about.

Don’t know if that means that my old theme was keeping my earnings down

That is possible but not likely. More likely is the converse, the ad implementation in the new theme is causing ads to be clicked when they shouldn't be.

You may also want to go through your stats and see if the increased revenue is related to one specific "cause" such as one page get all the clicks, or mobile users are causing the increase, or some geo location.

[cyberfyber]

Thanks Nick for the reply,
Yeah, today the CTR is way up there compared with the past weeks. Was going to say it's the highest this year until I looked at what it was like earlier in the year and it was much higher during the year's first three months. As mentioned, Google's been happy with the site's figures all year long.

It occurred to me that, out of cockiness I removed the block on some of those IP blocks at the beginning of the month.
Forgot that I'd done so.
I say cockiness since I did so extraordinarily well in July with very little invalid traffic...contrary to what I expected.

Set the IPs back to 'challenge' and I'll see going forward.

I'm curious though, are CPC Bids not based upon faulty info as well? Meaning, if I've got plenty of invalid traffic (pesky bots and such) then woildn't the CPC Bids wrongfully be based upon that? Or do I still not understand how that works?