Where is your adsense traffic coming from?

Contextual ads from a publisher that advertises

[loanuniverse]

In addition to being a publisher, I also dabble in a small scale in adwords. I purchase anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 visitors a month with a very small percentage {about 4% of those coming from adsense}. Today, I decided to take a look at where those visitors came from by looking at my logs and searching for “googlesyndication” referrals. To my surprise most if not all came from the following:

1-A well known northeastern newspaper.
2-Another big newspaper that happened to do an article about the widgets that I was promoting < Great targeting on that one btw >
3-A well recognized “portal for women”
4-The remaining was split into small sites.

I would have thought that more people were coming from the small sites, but #1 and #3 are definitely top 100 internet properties, and the targeting in #2 was incredibly good. Why can’t I have that kind of targeting as a publisher! :(

[ganderla]

I see quite a lot of people coming from my other sites :-)
I have had to put my own URL's in the blocking tool.
I also see some from about.com

[icedowl]

Mine come in from:

1. direct requests (bookmarks/favorites)
2. google
3. yahoo
4. aol search
5. smaller search engines
6. discussion groups
7. email from one person to another (neither known to me)

[loanuniverse]

icedowl: I was just talking about the paid traffic specifically that from the adsense portion of adwords :)

My traffic comes mostly from regular unpaid listings, but I found it interesting that most of the contextual adsense traffic seems to be coming from large publishers.

[birdstuff]

1 - About 40% from links in several free ebooks that I wrote that people download from my site and then place on their sites for download or give away as bonuses.

2 - Google SERPS (natural listings) (about 30%)

3 - The balance from other search engines and bookmarks.

[ogletree]

How can you tell where the adsense clicks are comeing from. That is not in the log files.

[birdstuff]

All of my sites' traffic is AdSense traffic (at least almost every page view displays AdSense, except for a handful of PSAs).

[loanuniverse]

How can you tell where the adsense clicks are comeing from. That is not in the log ...

look for the referrals from "googlesyndication.com" after that you will see url=http://www.publisher.com

[ogletree]

I never looked at the raw logs. My stat program does not tell me this. I guess I need to go digging.