Does the advertiser know where the adsense clicks come from?

[jrobbio]

I was wondering about how much advertisers know about where their adverts are appearing on sites and where the clicks are coming from. You wouldn't be able to find it through searching, but I'm sure some are dying to find out where they are all coming from. Yet again Google is holding the cards.

[europeforvisitors]

Yet again Google is holding the cards.

Can you blame them? If advertisers could identify which sites delivered the highest ROI, they'd bypass AdWords and make their own deals with the Webmasters of those sites.

[jrobbio]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Maybe they would offer some sort of "purchases" to be given stats, if expenditure was getting ridiculous and Google still wanted to keep them on the adsense.

Google want to make money, but surely they don't want to cripple them either.

Rob

[GumbyDave]

Absolutely. Log files, or sending people to affiliate programs, use a tracking script, like [tracking.script...]

I certainly won't violate the user agreement, but depending on the script, who the visitor is, how many times they clicked on the link and how far apart the clicks were, the TLD/IP when targeting a specific country, the actually page they clicked from, encoding, browser, etc. Not just Adsense, but some of the affiliate people might be surprised what the log file/script shows where they appear in search results/partner sites, given I have never seen a full list revealed by Google themselves.