Referrals from googleads.g.doubleclick.net . I don't have adwords running

Question

I am seeing referrals from googleads.g.doubleclick.net in Google Analytics reports off late. They are very sparse but it's there. I am confused as I understand this may be referral from AdWords but I don't have any campaign running (and never have for this domain). Neither do I have any affiliate program, so an affiliate running an ad campaign is also out of the question. So, what does that imply? Should I be worried or can I just ignore it?

Solution 1

If you are not running any AdWords campaign But You may have Added the Google's "Matched Content Native Ads" on your website/blog. I guess you know about the matched content ads. When someone clicks the matched content ads and that content belongs to your website/blog then you'll get a referral traffic from googleads.g.doubleclick.net!

Solution 2

Two probability may be exist.

Firstly (Optimistic): one of your users may be advertise him/her personal page or web log or her favourite content.

Secondly (Pessimistic) : any person may started any advertisement (may be video ads) that should have illegal or not trusted bases. Then required link for her ads shown as you domain. For example if I want start any ads about fake drag then showing tel number on ads would be enough for me. But google request url to complete process.

You can search your domain name in google to see any advertisements there. Then you can hover them for find which ad cause this traffic.

Comments

[Brendon]

Do you have any other ad agreements running outside of AdWords? A lot of publishers use the DoubleClick platform to track serve and track advertising -- as far as I am aware, the referral source is the same as for AdWords.

[derpoliuk]

No. The only thing ad related on that domain (it is a new site so still not optimized for revenue) is that I have put couple of adsense blocks (on the site, not campaign for the site), but I don't have any kinds of ad campaigns from any services/platforms running for the site.

[Henry Visotski]

Well, there you go. AdTech product often has components of other ad services baked in. A single tag may have multiple pixels firing, anything from analytics to other kinds of partner data collection. Also, tiny bits of residual traffic may be programatically dripping through in these cases; they may not even be human. To analyze further, I recommend installing Google Tag Assistant AND Ghostery - both browser add-on widgets. The first is Google-specific. The other detects everything. You may be surprised what shows up!