Looking for the impossible

Content sites

[lloyd]

I don't normally pay any attention to the content site results but in the last fortnight I have just started a new Adwords campaign aimed at the British Expat market and the volume of impressions is outstripping Google by 4,800%. The click are not great in comparision but not a click is a click.

My question is, is there anyway of working out where these impressions (not clicks) are coming from for example what site is generating this. I have tried running a report on Google but this also leaves me clueless.

I don't think I am being spammed as the number of clicks don't indicate this.

I have looked at some of the expat websites I am aware of but can not see any of them using Adsense (adwords) with a listing for my website.

[corbing]

Take a look at your logs. In there you will see a referrer for content sites that comes from googlgesyndication.com. In that long referal string you will see the URL from the content site.

[lloyd]

hi corbig

Yeah for clicks but it is the impressions that I am interested in. If Google know how many impressions a content site gets, then why can it not list them?

[corbing]

Ah, I see. I read it wrong.

Well, they could tell you, but then they would have to kill you.

[MovingOnUp]

If you're not getting clicks from them, it doesn't really matter. The impressions won't hurt you. In fact, you might even be getting a bit of an advantage because you'll get a little bit of free branding from the clickless impressions.

[werty]

You can just do a search for various components of your ad on the major search engines...usually they will have a snippet of your adwords ad and you should be able to see where your ads were appearing.

If your ad is:

Buy Widgets Now
Over 10,000 widgets in stock.
Low prices, free shipping.
example.com

do a search for:
example.com "buy widgets now"

I would not worry unless you are getting a flood of clicks that are not converting.