Odd page impressions over the last few days

Anyone else see this?

[btas2]

Normally my page impressions follow a very predictable pattern. Highest on Monday, lowest on Saturday.

However for the last 3 or 4 days, page impressions have been going up. The last couple of days (which typically would be low) have been higher than my highest numbers for months.

Normally I'd say "great", I'm getting more traffic and generating more income. However my weblogs show normal traffic patterns, with fewer visitors and pageloads on Saturday/Sunday as normal. I can't see any spikes in traffic at all.

It almost seems like Google have changed the way they count page impressions. Now I did add "referal" links to some of my pages recently and I'm now wondering if that's causing the difference. Only downside to that argument is that my revenues seem up a bit and none of the referrals has earned any money yet!

So I'm at a bit of a loss. My page impressions are up according to AdSense, which is great, my bottom line seems up a bit, but my weblogs and Urchin traffic anaysis isn't showing any increased traffic or unusual referrals to my site.

I'm not complaining, I'm just puzzled. Anyone else see anything like this over the last 3 or 4 days?

[Freedom]

Actually, since about Oct. 25, my page impression count is 75 percent of what it should be, even though my own page trackers on my sites are showing normal.

SO I have just the opposite problem. However, this causing me a great deal of alarm because now I have unnatural looking Click through rates of 30 percent, 50 percent and in one case, 200 percent click through rate.

I've always known that page impressions don't update the same time as CTR/EPC does, but it's been like this for about 10 days now according to my records.

It's strange. Very strange.

[btas2]

Just to put some numbers on this, for a year or so my weekend (Sat/Sun) page impressions have been about 75% of my early week (Mon/Tues) page impressions. Very predictable, very steady.

Over this last week, my weekend page impressions are 125% of my early week numbers.

I've never seen this before and I've been with Adsense almost from the begining.

Traffic spikes usually correlate with weblogs and being linked from a popular site, but my Urchin stats show neither to be the case this time.

The odd behavior seemed to kick in last Friday. Although reported page impressions are up, clicks are pretty much normal (and of course that means the CTR has dropped) and revenue is almost flat (maybe a slight increase, but that could be noise).

It's almost as though Adsense has suddenly started miscounting page impressions somehow. If I look at ad unit impressions rather than page impressions, things look a lot more normal.

[bumpski]

btas2

See this link:
[webmasterworld.com...]

same problem observed by several. We all dumped referrals until the small Adsense team can fix it.

I recently saw a photo of the Adsense team.
[adsense.blogspot.com...]
The team was so small, what is Google doing with all its shareholders money! Somebody's pocketing a lot of dough. Google get some people on the team, and pay them fairly!

[btas2]

OK, it's not just me then! Adsense is adding page impressions and referral impressions togther.

I'm not sure I really need to dump the referrals though. My revenue isn't down, in fact it seems up a bit. I suppose nobdy knows what effect the CPR has on smart pricing. If smart pricing is smart, it will depend on coversion ratio not CTR.

OTOH, I'm not seeing clicks on the referrals anyway so they aren't directly earning anything.

I think if I see bottom line revenue sliding, I'll dump the referral buttons, but if (for whatever unknown reason) it actually improves the bottom line, I'll hang onto them for a while.

Google certainly works in mysterious ways.