Forum Moderators: martinibuster
After contacting support many times (and getting unsatisfactory answers as to why by saying things like "not all traffic is counted as valid"), I think we may be close to figuring out the reason.
It appears the sites where the impressions are significantly less than they should be all involve domains which get lots of redirect traffic. It's from wildcard sub-domains, wildcard htm pages, or other forms of forwarding, including back to home-page 404's, 301 and 302 error code redirections, and server based Domain Pointers with Masked Forwarding.
Does anyone here know if redirected or forwarded traffic indeed does not count? If not, why not? Also, how can it be avoided so all traffic counts as valid impressions (and those resulting clicks also are of course as valid)?
My suggestion would be to either redirect users to a directly relevant page, or else don't run AdSense on the landing page. Don't even consider buying bulk traffic from a third party, and if you have a lot of traffic from dead domains then use DomainPark instead. That's what it's for.
P.S. Don't try to disguise where the traffic is coming from. This will just get you in deeper if and when Google investigate your traffic patterns.
I could understand wildcards upsetting the stats if you were talking about URL channels. But the total google stats are pretty reliable, as far as I know.
There can be all sorts of legitimate reasons for discrepancies. Eg: your stats might be including robots/spiders, but these don't cause ads to be displayed.
But for a discrepancy of 5 to 1, which you suggest, it may be a matter of counting different things: eg: hits rather than page views. Also, when this topic has been discussed in the past, it seems that some of the free/cheap stats packages are unreliable in their reporting (eg: some alleged this was true of AWSTATS).
I think it is reasonable to assume that the overall Google stats are correct, so the reason for the discrepancy lies elsewhere.
I own 4 domains that point to my primary site (domain A).
If I point domain B, to the directory of domain A, in my settings, the site pulls up as www.domain B.com and even as you surf into the site, the domain B stays in the address.
If I redirect domain B then the surfing and I assume Adsense works properly.
Is the first situation what G calls double websites?
My question is; As far as adsense is concerned...which why should I forward/redirect my domains? And...why?
Thanks for all the past and current help.
This happens to my sites for these main reasons:
A. Traffic from old domains we purchased which get lots of old wildcard traffic which I then redirect back to its own index page when we make the new site.
B. Closely related same or similar category/product domains where the site name is Widgets dot com and we redirect to its home-page (mostly using htaccess or domain pointers) the traffic from BlueWidgets dot com GreenWidgets dot com and RedWidgets dot com and PinkWidgets dot com. This is done as having 5 active websites is not needed and I only need to run one site since they are closely related.
This is legitimate targeted traffic and is not in any way considered spamming or sneaky or non-targeted.
Just looked again at some channels this morning and with a quick glance ran across 4 other sites where my 2 (well known and accurate) stats programs show very poor ratios, i.e. 50 uniques vs only 4 reported by G impressions. Robots and Crawlers etc are excluded from unique visit numbers by my stats programs, so that's not a factor.
Also got another reply from Adsense Support yesterday which say's the traffic only counts if the ads are displayed, duh! Well of course that is so and no need to say it, I am sure we all know that already. Why would the ads NOT display when they display for me at least 90% of the time when I go to the sites and I am convinced my traffic is genuine and real?
Could this issue be caused by G not recognizing redirected traffic as I suspect may be the case (see my first post)? If that is correct, what can be done about it? Thanks.
the issue has not been resolved with this thread...
Just looked again at some channels this morning
I think the answer is there. Whenever this topic has come up before (and it has fairly often) it has invariably been due to the way URL channels have been set up. Redirects and wildcards will muck up URL channel reporting, but Google's aggregate reporting is accurate.
As a simple example, if you track your 404.htm file as a URL channel, you'll find it will never records any data, despite being invoked frequently. The only time it will register in a URL channel is when you load the page directly by name, eg: to test it.
If you want to test this, set up a custom channel, enter it into all your ads, and then compare your URL and custom channel data. (Note there will still be discrepancies due to cacheing and such like, but not of the scale you are currently experiencing).
If you want stats that are as close as possible to Google's, you need to put a (cache-busted) tracking image inside an iframe that is generated by Javascript -- in other words make sure you are measuring exactly the same thing as Google does.
