AdSense Ad Targeting - Alternative Ads Impressions

My alternative ads show much more these days

[adfree]

...could that be responsible for the decline in EPC? My alternative ads show a lot more nowadays, somehow targeting is varying, these days rather to the down side (not finding enough suitable ads).

Anyone who can support this observation?

Jens

[richmondsteve]

It could be correlated. If there are few advertisers and ad supply exceeds demand then it's more likely that the ads being shown will be associated with a lower CPC (and EPC) than if the opposite were true.

[europeforvisitors]

Are "alternative ad" impressions counted as AdSense impressions?

[richmondsteve]

europeforvisitors, yes. PSAs and AAs are counted as impressions.

[ByronM]

I was thinking about this last night and i almost hope that if you have an alternative ad defigned that it wouldn't count as a adsense impression.

Just seems odd that your in the adsense system and if it can't generate an ad and you defign your own alternative that it would coount that as an impression.

If they clicked on the alternative ad, that couldn't possibly show up in adsense (or shouldn't) unless they use this to monitor your sites overall ctr.

[richmondsteve]

ByronM, a click on your AA is not recorded as a click in the AdSense reports. In the past I've said that it would be useful for Google to split paying impressions and PSA/AA impressions by displaying them in two separate columns and to use the paying impressions as the denominator when calculating CTR.

Since they don't, I track AA impressions via a simple script that parses my web server logs, plug my numbers and Google's into a spreadsheet and do my own calculations.

[gengar56]

How do you plug Google's numbers into a spreadsheet? Copy/paste doesn't work properly for me. I must be doing something wrong.

[richmondsteve]

gengar56, I just manually type impressions, clicks and earnings into my spreadsheet daily. I look at the screen once, switch screens and enter the numbers from memory. Total time - 5 seconds. But it should paste into the spreadsheet columns fine - I know I did a copy/paste of the all-time view into Excel with no problems back when AAs were first implemented.

[adfree]

Gents, there are AS reporting tools out there that do a great job (free) where you just paste your entire report (or parts of it) into a form and they spit out all sorts of stats for you.

TOS of this forum does not allow to share URL's but you're gonna find them with the help of the great G I am sure.

If not, sticky me, cheers, Jens

[jomaxx]

There may be a way to set an Excel spreadsheet to delimit based on multiple spaces. I'd love to know how.

What I do is open a text editor (TextPad), paste the Google numbers, then basically do a search on space-space, and replace multiple spaces with one tab character. Then THAT tab-delimited line can be pasted into the corresponding cells of the spreadsheet.

Takes less than 30 seconds from Google to Excel. Maybe not faster than typing, but I always cut-and-paste when I can to minimize typos.