Unusual increase in CTR for some Google Adsense publishers

During the past few days some Adsense publishers are concerned about their click through rates (CTR) for their Google ads running on their site. While seeing this unusual CTR increase , initially the publishers seemed to be excited seeing lot of $'s in their account but for not long enough and they started worrying about their account since the scenario continued from then and according to Google policies, clicks coming from invalid activity can lead to account blockage. A lot of publishers reported to have a 2 to 6 fold increase in their CTR when compared to their normal day CTR's.

Click Bombing.

The term that is used for this is Click Bombing where few impressions tend to get more clicks than normal.While their might be a lot of reasons for Click Bombing out of which few are explained below -

1) The publisher is involved in some sort of click exchange program.

Here the publisher knowingly hires people for getting clicks on their ads but this doesn't seems to be a reason here since a lot of publishers are affected.

2) Someone wants your account to be blocked.

Again this is not possible here in this case since lot of publishers are involved here.

3) To hurt Google.

In this situation this seems to be the most relevant reason why this sort of a thing is happening.

While many publishers have already reported this issue to Google but till now no official announcement has come from the Google's end.

Is there anything to worry about my account or my money?

Google seems to be knowing this issue as of now and working to rectify it, the thing is that you need not to worry about your account but neither does that mean that all the earning that came from this will be yours because at the time of real payment Google will surely cut down the $'s from your account that came from illegal activity but you should not be worried about money coming from real clicks because whatever is natural Google will surely not cut your money coming from that.

Meanwhile what can I do?

While I hope that Google is working out closely on this issue of Click Bombing attack, there are a few things that you can do to be on a safer side -

1)  Report to Google about this issue here

2) While the publishers seems to be claiming the clicks seems to be coming from XLHOST. - 209.190.32.178 and Firefox version 27 which can be checked from your log file and Analytics Adsense data respectivel. If you have the same scenario then you can block the browser version using your .htaccess file.

To avoid getting click bombed you can block the Mozilla 27 browser by putting the following code into your .htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Firefox/27\.0 [NC]

RewriteRule .* – [F,L]

Other way can be that you can block that IP in which case you might be loosing some genuine traffic coming from that IP. 

Note : This will block all the users coming from mozilla firefox 27 and you might be loosing some traffic, also the trend might change and click bombing might start happening from some other browser or IP so this is a temporary solution and you have to wait for Google's work for the permanent solution to this problem.

Update : The issue got resolved by the Google on 21st of April but a lot of people seemed to have got big $ cuts in their adsense account which is even lower than their daily average earning.
Anyways, be aware of such activities and will keep you guys posted if anything like this happens again.