Is Page Impressions meant to add up?

Numbers don't make much sense

[gibbergibber]

According to Adsense, yesterday I had about 2000 page impressions. However when I click on Top Channels I get individual figures of which add up to over 3000. This kind of maths has been happening for a long time now.

What's going on?

[tim222]

One way that could happen is if you have two channels targeting the same page. For example if you have a URL channel on index.htm, plus you have a channel associated with an ad on index.htm (such as a channel that identifies it as a 120x600 text ad), then you'll get two impressions counted in that second report.

[gibbergibber]

I don't though, the channels are for totally separate sites. Each site has just one channel's ads on it.

[seoaddict23]

My numbers don't make sense either...and never have! For example my page impressions on adsense never match my pageviews on google analytics. Furthermore on the registrar website for my domain names my impressions don't match either analytics or adsense! Which numbers should I trust?

[gibbergibber]

The Adsense and Analytics numbers may differ because their timescale differs. The 24 hours measured by Adsense is a different period to the 24 hours measured by Analytics (ie they start their 24 hour day at different clock times). However, if your traffic is steady from day to day then the numbers should be generally the same.

What I'm having problems with is Adsense's own impressions numbers not matching its own total impressions.

[gibbergibber]

Is it possible that the Page Impressions total is actually giving us unique visitors?

It always seems to be substantially smaller than the page totals below it, but it goes up and down in relation to them, so it would make sense if "Page Impressions" was actually "Total Visitors".

[tim222]

Is it possible that the Page Impressions total is actually giving us unique visitors?

I wish :) But I really doubt it. The Page Impressions total in my stats is too high to be uniques.

[mack]

remember some users have ad blockers. if these users access the site it will block the request to the adsense server. This will lead to less google adsense reported page views, as opposed to your actual page views.

Mack.

[gibbergibber]

--remember some users have ad blockers. if these users access the site it will block the request to the adsense server. This will lead to less google adsense reported page views, as opposed to your actual page views.--

But I'm not comparing Adsense with anything else, I'm only comparing Adsense's total with Adsense's channel numbers.

If it strips away ad-blockers on the total, why wouldn't it strip them away on the channel numbers as well?

Today for example it says one particular channel got 4000 page views, but the total page views across all channels is listed as 3000. How does that make any sense?