Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Here's the problem - every day we average paying for 12,000 clicks through google and overture (8,000 google & 4,000 overture), yet our adsense reporting area only shows an average of 6,500 impressions per day.
It seems awfully convenient for google & overture to be charging us for double the amount of visitors that adsense says we're getting. It seems we could be paying for clicks we're not getting, or being underpaid by adsense, or both!
Is adsense a reliable source for true impression numbers? Does adsense always display for every visitor, or only some?
Anyone else experience something similar?
(Or maybe it has something to do with kitty litter.)
Anyone else experience something similar?
I have an opposite experience.
Page impressions in AdSense are actually the ad impressions.
Take a spin around your site with the preview tool set to different geo-locations.
I've only been with adsense for 4 months but learned to trust Google completely. I sensed that they are the very few trustworthy PPC & contextual ad companies out there. Even though they don't reveal much, I believe they are giving publishers more than 50% of the total earnings per click.
I've tried many other companies and will never go back to them again.
kz
I had an interesting related observation just today. I was switching a page from named channel tracking to URL channel tracking a few days ago, but left the name channel tag on the page and forgot to delete the name channel on my account, so it was getting tracked by both channel name AND URL for a few days.
Turns out on the second complete day of this overlap the name channel was 490 impressions vs 481 via the URL and one Click higher, whereas one would expect them to be identical. On the third day they were 578 and 569 respectively with the same amount of clicks. Hmmm.
I even double checked to make sure no other page was using the same name tag. Anyone else observe this?
I've been using adsense and seeing this discrepancy since summer 2003. This should be because of the ads not delivered to some pages once in a while. Google states somewhere that adSense impressions no should not be used as a measure of page impressions.
Many people use personal firewalls like Norton which also blocks ads. I've seen my site on a few computers that had ad blocking enabled and they were all gone except for the few I serve up directly from my server.
So, out of my 36,000 pages a day:
- deduct search engines crawling the site
- deduct the google media bot
- deduct no ads on personal firewalls and banner blockers
- deduct google PSA ads
I think you see where this is going....
I was under the impression that adsense recognized keywords from any search engine and displayed accordingly. That is obviously not the case.
They let me know that even if someone types in keywords on yahoo to get to our site, adsense doesn't recognize that, and does not display, because yahoo owns overture.
I'm not sure I'm understanding that answer.
If someone goes to Yahoo, searches for a site using the keyword widgets and clicks on a search engine result to go to widgets-domain-here.net with an adsense ad on it, Adsense won't show or log an impression?
That's not correct.
I've got to be missing some piece of the puzzle here.
I was under the impression that adsense recognized keywords from any search engine and displayed accordingly. That is obviously not the case.
Nope, that sure isn't the case. Adsense matches ads to the text that is on your page(s). It could care less how someone found your site.
The discrepency between URL tracking and Channel name tracking might come from various cached sources, which are displaying an older version of your code. It could easily acount for that small difference of 9 impressions. There are so many versions of every page around (in google's cache, askjeeves cache, site strippers, web browsers ...)that I wouldn't expect the stats to come out equal.
They wrote:
"As you may already know, Overture is not a member of the Google network. Therefore, the 2000 clicks you received in your Overture account would not impact your number of AdSense impressions".
I'm just the messenger.
Kelly
It's just stupid.
Wonder who else they filter?
More importantly, do they filter out ALL Overture links from all Overture partners?
Do they filter out the "additional listings" beyond the paid listings on overture?
That would be real easy to defeat, sign up for one of googles competitors and write a little javascript that determines bases on the referrer whether Google gets displayed or BrandX ads.
I know posting URLs here is verbotten, but if someone has a working example of an Overture link to an Adsense site, I'd like to see it - send me sticky mail, as if it's true I got some javascript to start writing.
I had a senior account rep at Google confirm that clicks from Overture sites will not trigger an adsense ad on our site.
They wrote:"As you may already know, Overture is not a member of the Google network. Therefore, the 2000 clicks you received in your Overture account would not impact your number of AdSense impressions".
This statement from senior account rep has costed me 20 cents. I clicked on my own ad from MSN & Yahoo searches for one of my cheapest keyphrases in my Overture account. (I can't wait 2 days for channel data and testing.) I saw the landing page with AdSense ads on it, very well targeted ads. If the AdSense is shown, the AdSense impression must be counted also. If it didn't count, someone clicks on it and the result is a buy. How does Google treat this sale? A sale with an invalid click?
The above statement can not be true. This senior account rep has missed something. She/he doesn't understand the connection between a click and its impression.
Do any google adwords or adsense people post on these boards?
The best thing to do here is resort to your own webserver logs. How many clicks in do you see in your own logs?
You should be able to identify clicks in your logs that came from Overture and from Google and verify that they are billing you correctly.
You should be able to estimate how many AdSense impressions you should have based on the number of page views in your own log file, and cross-check that with AdSense stats.
Once you have data based on your logs you should be able to forward that data to Overture, Google, and AdSense and demand an explanation for why your logs show something different than their statistics.
I don't think Google is going to care or pay any attention to what a competitors stats show, but they ought to pay attention to what your own logs show.
