AdSense Click Bombing Problem

Marketing
1

Over the last few weeks, two of my clients, who use AdSense, have been undergoing a click-bombing attack.

The average number of clicks per day as well as the CTR has gone up over 1000%. As is usual with this type of thing, in spite of the increased clicks, revenue has gone down the toilet. The second site that fell victim to it has 70 clicks (way above average) for a whopping total of 41 cents in revenue so far today (which is well below average). The previous two days were bad as well, though not as bad as today’s report shows. This second site has also been smart-priced since July, as the average earnings per click has fallen well over 50% since then. AdSense seems to have something against this site for some reason. (even though that site has used AdSense for over 3 years without problems before these issues started popping up lately)

I did go to the “Allowed Sites” tool in AdSense Setup and limited ads to being displayed only by the client’s URL and it did seem to help the first site somewhat after a few days, though there was still an increased click load and daily earnings were wildly inconsistent, as opposed to what they usually are. I just did the same thing for the second site, and I will get a better feel for how that is working over the next day or so, I think.

I also alerted Google AdSenese Support about this situation, twice. But shock of shocks, I received no response from them. The Google AdSense Support Team is as invisible as Bigfoot and proof of their existence is even less reliable. In other words. typical Google non-support.

I also checked AwStats and see that today, the second site was getting a lot of suspicious foreign ip’s (Thailand, Iran, S. Korea) that were listed at the top of the page views. Those ip’s have been blocked via htaccess and I will keeping a sharp eye on them over the next few days.

I went to the AdSense forums, but they just give the usual spiel about essentially removing all AdSense code from all sites in the AdSense account, while keeping some hidden AdSense code on a site that no one would frequent. In other words, turn off the revenue spigot for awhile, and hope that the bomber does not return. Lovely.

I am wondering if anyone else here has gone through this and found a solution to it that does involve turning off AdSense? Since these are not my sites but my client’s sites, and since these clients rely on the AdSense revenue, I cannot just arbitrarily turn it off.

Thanks.

2

Hi

What you could do is install an Adserver like OpenX, serve Adsense via this Adserver and install frequenzy capping for your Adsense Ads.
This way the clickbomber would only see Adsense ads a defined number of times.

I think a year ago or so there was a adsense tracking software out there which could also hide the Adsense Ads after it got clicked.
Sorry but I can’t remember the name.

However if they use scripts to load and click your adsense ads or depending on the method of capping (e.g. cookies) it could not work.
The best way is to ban IP ranges from those countries entirely if they don’t belong to your target audience rather then banning individual ip adresses.

Good Luck

StarBuG

3

Thanks DaStarBuG.

I will look into those options if it gets to that point. For now, since the first site seems to be weathering the storm OK and the second site was just hit, I will monitor things for a bit before taking more proactive steps.

On the foreign ips, I will see if there is a pattern of the same octets leaking through after these initial individual ip blocks.

4

You could do like I did when I spotted a lot of incoming traffic from china with no referrer, and also increased clicks on my pages (not in chinese language)
I contacted adsense stating my problem and offering any log they’d need.
The answer was not to bother about it.

In the end, the traffic lasted several days and I got to keep the earnings, but I have never been able to know where they were coming from and why.