Spotting Click Bombing with Google Analytics

© April 2015 Anthony Lawrence

Yesterday I wrote about a click bombing incident that this site suffered through. Although I found the culprits by analyzing my web logs, I later realized that I could have used Google Analytics also.

The report shown here is just the normal Behavior -> Adsense -> Adsense Pages report with the secondary dimension Users -> Network Domain added. That plainly shows the domain(s) responsible for Adsense activity.

However, it's also possible for click-bombing to be indirect: someone posts your URL somewhere and encourages others to attack you. That sort of activity MIGHT be able to be spotted with the Acquisition -> Overview -> Referrals report with Adsense added to it:

In this case, there was none of that activity and the report plainly shows it.

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