It's not hard to imagine how some nasty adware on someone's PC would pop up ads as a person searches or browses that end up sending the person to your web site.
To illustrate how this might work, let's build a bridge from a visitor to your web site. I'm making this up but it's probably pretty close to what is happening.
Unsuspecting user is browsing, searching, playing some online game, etc on their PC, tablet, or smart phone. All of a sudden boom! up pops an ad related to something they typed, clicked, texted, tweeted, discussed in an email, posted on facebook, read about in a news site, or otherwise thought about.
These popup ads come from a server someplace, and it's probably a network that sells traffic based on user behavior on an "infected" PC (likely using some cootie that got installed with the user's permission when they clicked "I Accept the Terms of Service" without actually reading the terms of service while downloading some free game, ring tone, or utility software).
In order to see what you are describing in your Clicky reports, I would guess that the links in those popup ads point back to the ad servers, which then tally up the service fees for the guy who bought the click and then proxy out to your site. So the end result is your site sees the traffic coming from the ad servers looking just like a link from any other web server on the net.
The ad network may or may not share with you the info that triggered the popup. My guess is they probably don't, since you are not paying for the traffic. They probably do share feedback with the person who bought the click from the network so they can optimize their ad campaigns. This way the ad network serves their customer (the people who pay for the traffic), and all you see is incoming traffic from the ad network which might entice you to visit them and buy some more traffic from them.
If you want to know who is doing it, then the question is who would make money by sending traffic to your site?
Is that an affiliate link coming in from the ad server? If so, do you care? If you care, do you have a policy against affiliates using ad ware to hijack traffic and send it to your site? If yes to all, then you should have all the info you need to chastise the offending affiliate.
If you simply don't want any traffic from this ad network, then it would be easy to have your web server block anything coming from the ad network or send it wherever else you want that doesn't make money for the person paying for the clicks. It wouldn't take long for the people buying the clicks to see they aren't profitable, and the traffic will grind to a halt from that ad network.
Of course to do that you have to turn away visitors and the sales that might come from them. And word might get around among affiliates that your site doesn't convert well, which could cost you affiliates unless you publicize that you don't accept clicks from that ad network. So if you decide to take on the ad network, let your affiliates know and put something in the affiliate agreement prohibiting use of that network like you do for spam.
If you are interested in how this works in order to learn how to do more of it, then I guess I would go talk to the adware company. They probably offer a service where you can buy traffic from their network. Sounds like someone else is already doing that to send you the traffic you have noticed coming from the adware servers.
Posted Sun Dec 15 2013 9:19a by edyod***
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