Help with stats interpretation

clicks, but no earnings, but non-zero eCPM

[Mr_Smithee]

Can someone tell me what's happening when a channel has for example 100 impressions, 2 clicks, 0.00 earnings and 0.02 eCPM? Another channel has zero clicks, zero earnings and 0.01 eCPM.

I assume that there are site-targeted ads on the page, but even with that in mind, I don't quite understand those stats. Is Google making fun of me?

[joelgreen]

Click "Advanced Reports" section, "Show data by" set to "Individual Ad", mark "Show data by targeting type - contextual or site" check box. Generate report. Look at your stats where "Targeting" is "Site". Look at clicks column. Maybe those 2 clicks were on CPM ads, and Google does not pay for clicks on CPM ads.

Also Google could treat those 2 clicks as invalid.

[Mr_Smithee]

Thank you. After looking at the detailed statistics, I'm even more confused. The clicks were indeed on site-targeted ads. The eCPM of the site targeted ads is several times higher than the eCPM of the contextual ads, but they're only served for a tiny fraction of all impressions. Shouldn't the eCPM of both ad types be roughly the same?

[Pengi]

Mr_Smithee

It won't help you much, but with only 100 impressions any stats are going to produce pretty unusual, highly variable and generally meaningless data.

It's highly unlikely that you are showing any site targeted ads with the number of impressions you indicate

I believe you need your number of clicks to be in the hundreds if not thousands at least before you can really start to get any useful data from the stats.

Work on building content and links to get your traffic up.

[racer_x]

From what I have observed Google appears to be price some click throughs at less than 1 cent.

However it appears that Google do their calculations using fractions of cents (maybe hundredths). As the ECPM is calculated to an accuracy greater than just dollars and cents would allow.

So although it may appear as 0 cents in the stats it is actually 0.x cents. And those fractions of cents do add up to make whole cents when the total is calculated.

[Mr_Smithee]

Pengi, that channel is just one page right now. The advanced report indeed lists a small number of site-targeted ads, with the associated eCPM. I understand that the few site-targeted ads among the 100 impressions don't amount to more than half a cent, so the related earnings don't show, and clicks on these ads don't pay extra. The other channel didn't have clicks, but the fraction of the eCPM of the site-targeted ads amounted to 1cent, with no earnings shown due to the low impression count.

What stumps me now is how different the eCPMs of the two ad types are: The eCPM of the site-targeted ads should be relatively stable, regardless of the low number of impressions, right? The eCPM of the contextual ads looks pretty stable after about 100000 impressions. Why do the site-targeting adword customers need to pay several times more eCPM to get just the few impressions in?

[Pengi]

For PPC ads it's clicks that matter not immpressions.

Different ads appear on your pages - what each ad pays can vary enormously.

For meaningful stats about your average earnings per click you need 100's of Clicks - the number of impressions is irrelevant.

In addition, for very low values of earnings, I would expect that rounding errors and currency variations have a disproportionate affect.