I provide a free banner rotation service on my site (http://www.mudmall.com) and it appears someone or something has been 'spam clicking' my banners. Not that I really mind, I'm just curious as to why someone would do this. Here an example of what I mean with the banner statistics for one of the accounts on my site.

The columns are as follows: date - number of views - number of clicks - click ratio

As you can see, there was a big increase in the number of clicks on March 6 & 7. This is similar for all accounts in my banner rotation. I can't understand why someone would want to do this, the banners just link to other sites. Has anyone else has something similar to this happen to them?

This post has been edited by Avalon: Mar 11 2006, 01:46 AM

Avalon,
I do not use any banners ads on any of my pages, however, your posting has prompted me to check the stats on my sites and I noticed that there was one day when the usage was approximately 4 times the typical day. I wonder what is happening, too. I will investigate and let you know what (if anything) I discover about that date. It was March 8th.

The banner service I provide is just to give some free advertising to other sites that have a similar theme to mine. I don't gain any advantage from the banners, except maybe a few extra hits from voluntary reciprocal links. Because it appears all banners had this increase in clicks, I tend to think this was a bot of some type. I just can't see the point of it.

I think that somebody wanted to cheat =)