Adsense page views...

counting bot visits?

[Visi]

Always thought that adsense did not count bot visits, however have to start questiong this in lieu of the stats this month. With the MSN bot hammering our site, and increased activity of the googlebot also this month, our webstats to adsense page impressions are still at the mid 90% correlation. Definitly affects the CTR's we are seeing lately. We are looking at a correlation that should be in the 60& range for the first 10 days of the month based on our webstats?

[richmondsteve]

If the bot executes JavaScript it could trigger the AdSense impression, otherwise it couldn't. I don't believe msnbot does this, but I'm not certain. I'm not aware of any major SEs that would load the AdSense JS. Is anyone aware of any?

You can always do the following test - create a page (or use an existing page) that loads an obscure image file on the onLoad event (or some other event), link to the test page from one of your pages and after msnbot visits it, check your web server logs to see if it visited it. Check the IP in addition to the UA just to be sure it's msnbot.

[ChrisKud5]

It is a total mystery as to what is counted and what is not, but as far as I know the trend around here is for publishers to usually see much lower impressions counted by google than recorded by most server log analyzers and tracking scripts. We will never know, as false impressions are a no no, and they are not going to tell us what they consider false or not false.

[olwen]

I was wondering about MSN bot too. I don't get many page impressions, and today's was more than 3 times the previous highest impressions. MSN bot and Slurp were on the site, and I was wondering if one of them was reading the javascript.

[richmondsteve]

ChrisKud5 wrote:

It is a total mystery as to what is counted and what is not

It's not a mystery to me. Google explains it here [google.com] and here [google.com] and my results have been consistently within a few percentage points of what I'd expect when adjusting logs for the listed factors I can measure.

[Visi]

Up until recently have to agree with Richmond. Had this occur once before but normally can corelate the bots into the equation accurately. This month somethings going on and seems to point to the msn bot activity. Slurp has been on our site awhile without this effect being seen. Will keep watching this month as the msn bot still spidering hard.

[ExpLarry]

I use a simple script to scan my logfiles and produce a more-or-less accurate number for "real" (i.e. fingers on mice) hits. Currently the ratio of bot hits to "real" hits is 5:1; the number in the adsense stats is always pretty much the same as what I work out myself. There is no way any hits from the major bots are being counted (unless 95% of visitors are surfing with non-JS enabled browesers).