My ad CTR is 8.9% and I think that's bad news

Got my AdMob monthly report. Revenue up 42% from the previous month. Nice.

Then I looked at what drove it. Impressions were flat, down 0.1%. Clicks were up 116%.

So the revenue didn't come from more traffic. It came from people clicking a lot more. 9,361 impressions, 834 clicks. That's an 8.9% click-through rate.

Normal for mobile display is somewhere around 1-2%.

Why I'm not celebrating: a few weeks ago Google restricted ads on a different app of mine. The reason given was "ads disguised as content." I ignored it because that app has 73 users and makes nothing.

Now I'm looking at a CTR five times the benchmark on my main app and wondering whether it's good placement or whether people are hitting the banner while trying to tap something else.

I genuinely don't know which it is yet. Accidental clicks look identical to real clicks in the dashboard. The only way to tell is to go look at where the ad actually sits relative to the buttons people use.

The uncomfortable part: if it's accidental, the revenue is temporary. Google flags invalid traffic eventually, and the correction isn't gentle. And in the meantime I'd be making money off people being annoyed.

The lesson I keep relearning is that a metric moving in the right direction tells you nothing on its own. Revenue up 42% felt like a win until I asked what produced it.

Has anyone here dug into a metric that looked great and turned out to be a symptom? Curious what it was and how you caught it.