strange external links from adsense ads

[newbies]

My site uses adsense, but I didn't run adword for my site. When I check my site stats this month, I notice a lot of external links are from google adsense ads with the url "pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk", which means some visitors reach my site by clicking an adsense ad. Who is running the ads (for free) for me?

That's very strange. Anybody experienced the same?

[newbies]

I am still getting inbound traffic from google adsense URL. Can someone explain why?

BTW, I have never run adword for my site.

Thanks

[ownerrim]

Had the exact same thing happen to me several weeks ago. Noticed the same url as a referrer and was very puzzled by it since I run adsense but have never run an adwords ad.

Some suggested that it might be the result of running an alternate ad, but I've never done this either. In just a few short days, I got almost ten thousand extra visits this way, apparently by people clicking on an ad that lead to my site.

I emailed google about it and they said they would monitor it but I never heard anything back.

[jomaxx]

Sometimes browsers just get confused, especially when redirects are involved. I see incorrect referrers every day.

[Jenstar]

It might be from advertisers clicking through from their logs to see what content sites their ads are coming from. It does contain that string in the referral URL.

[newbies]

>>It might be from advertisers clicking through from their logs to see what content sites their ads are coming from. It does contain that string in the referral URL.

It seems unlikely because I have got over 2k traffic from that adsense link for the past ten days.

[larryhatch]

Newbies: " .. which means some visitors reach my site by clicking an adsense ad.
Who is running the ads (for free) for me? "

Did any of these visitors convert? (buy something?)
If so, its 'found money'. If not, it could well be advertisers
looking to see where their hits came from or something like that.
I suppose its possible a very similar URL got garbled into yours. -Larry

[jomaxx]

But wait a sec, when AdWords advertisers get clicks on their ads, don't they see the originating page in the referrer field of their logs? Not some "pagead2.googlesyndication.com" URL. That's how they know what sites are sending them traffic.

[arrowman]

My site uses adsense, but I didn't run adword for my site. When I check my site stats this month, I notice a lot of external links are from google adsense ads with the url "pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk"

Wouldn't that be visitors of your site, who clicked an ad, and then clicked 'back'?

[newbies]

>>Wouldn't that be visitors of your site, who clicked an ad, and then clicked 'back'?

Nice guess. Very likely.

However, I have run adsense for over one year. This is the first time I see adsense URL shows up in my site's referee list, not just in the list, but top the list!

[ownerrim]

Newbies, when I said the exact same thing happened to me, I meant the EXACT same thing, including this url in my list of referrers: pagead2.googlesyndication.com
Then, as now, everyone was clueless as to why it happened.

[Jenstar]

Could it be a link from an alternative AdSense ad that either you or another publisher is running? I don't use custom alternative ads (I use the collapsing script) so I can't check the referrals. But with those kind of numbers, it could be a possibility, particularly since you are not seeing anything that could be AdWords in the regular serps.

[Alioc]

With all of the eliminated guesses, the strongest possibility remains as typo.
- Ownerrim, Newbies,
are you aware of other sites with very similar domain names?
- Ownerrim, is that stop for you after writing to Google? If it did, that increases the possibility of a mistyped URL because Google might have warned the advertiser.
- Are you providing free hosting, URL forwarding, blog space or something similar? Some dummy might have entered the domain name only instead of full URL to his/her account.

[ownerrim]

Actually, in my case, though I never heard back from google, it did stop about 3 days after writing google. Could have been coincidental. As far as a typo, not likely since it was a very specific interior (with a long and unique doc name) page that was receiving the extra traffic (many thousands of uniques per day).

"Are you providing free hosting, URL forwarding, blog space or something similar?"

Nope.