Why are adsense Impressions reported far below actual stats?

[trader]

We recently purchased 3 domain names which have traffic going to the old websites, most of which comes from a number of outside links and goes to various htm pages, not the index page.

Domain-A according to both weblizer and another counter gets 600 visits/day but only 20/day impressions according to the adsense url channel.

Domain-G according to both weblizer and another counter gets 550 visits/day but only 30/day impressions according to the adsense url channel.

Domain-S according to both weblizer and another counter gets 700 visits/day but only 200/day impressions according to the adsense url channel.

That's 1,850/day but only 270 adsense impressions are reported, with very few clicks or income.

We have written Adsense support several times asking how this is possible? They reply with several possible common reasons but none seem applicable and all look somewhat far fetched.

The only unusual thing with these 3 domains (and which they all have in common) is the vast majority of their traffic is coming from links which go to old htm files which are not in the folder (I only puchased the domain, not the files, don't even know the old htm file names). All I have setup is one page (index.html) for each site.

Only a fraction of traffic goes directly from the links to the index file. Therefore, this htaccess file is installed:

ErrorDocument 401 /index.html
ErrorDocument 403 [domain.com...]
ErrorDocument 400 [domain.com...]
ErrorDocument 404 [domain.com...]
ErrorDocument 502 [domain.com...]
ErrorDocument 501 [domain.com...]

Is there some way the htaccess could be causing this major discrepancy? Also, if in fact that is the case does G perhaps not count both impressions and clicks due to this issue? Any solution? Thanks.

[morpheus83]

I had th same issue, I used Urchin to track stats and Adsense 20 % less impressions. Many users use Ad blockers like Norton Internet security etc which block adsense. Due to which their impressions are not reported in adsense. Is your site also accessed by PDA's and Mobiles as adsense does not support them.

[trader]

I had the same issue, I used Urchin to track stats and Adsense 20 % less impressions. Many users use Ad blockers like Norton Internet security etc which block adsense. Due to which their impressions are not reported in adsense. Is your site also accessed by PDA's and Mobiles as adsense does not support them.

Am sure my sites have roughly the same percentage of visitors with ad blockers running and PDA/Mobile access than an average website where there are normaly small differences. I too have seen 20% discrepancies with some of my other websites in my network of sites and am not too concerned about relatively small variations like 20% or less.

Those were also some reasons G gave me for this and I agree they could possibly account for 20% less impressions. However, they are quite far fetched reasons to see 95% less impressions such as with my domains A and G for example, where ad impressions are less than 5% of what they should be!

I am leaning toward the fact credit is not given for impressions (and clicks too?) as a results of so much traffic percentage wise arriving at the index page because of htaccess.

However, not certain about that (htaccess) being the cause. But if so what may be done about it as this is a major impact on income (clicks/income are insignificant due to this issue).

Anyone else with ideas? Please help! Thanks.

[trader]

Is a reason for the slow feedback perhaps because it was posted in the wrong forum?

Any feedback and help would be most appeciated as this issue is driving me nuts and also loosing lots of income.

[trader]

This is apparently not a good forum for getting much in the way of technical help and feedback!

On to a different forum, bye.

[walrus]

Just a shot in the dark ,
Is there any chance you're confusing hits with impressions?
Or does your log data show any odd activity?

[Rodney]

Is it possible that the person(s) you bought the websites from somehow misrepresented (or artificially inflated) the traffic prior to the purchase?

[maximillianos]

My site's pageviews match up very close to my Adsense stats... In fact, I'll often just use my Adsense stats to gauge my traffic levels now a days... ;-)

[Powdork]

Could be something to do with bots like slurp and mediapartners being recorded by webalizer (or any visitor that doesn't call up the js file). Call an external .js file from the pages with adsense and compare how many times that file is called to your adsense impressions.