Discrepancy Between 3rd Party Tracker and AdSense

[realmaverick]

Hey guys,

I had a feeling Google were not paying us for all of the clicks we receive. My suspicions were aroused because our website is growing rapidly yet our clicks were not, at least according to Google. So I installed a third party tracker to see just what the score was.

Today for example Google reports one particular ad block received 270 clicks but in actual fact it's received over 900.

I understood google smartpriced but to actually not pay us at all for over 2/3 of the clicks. I personally feel duped.

Can anybody offer a possible explanation for Google's recordings?

Thanks in advance.

Be well

Paul

[dibbern2]

If you look about this forum you'll find many threads about this subject.

The un-reliability of 3rd party trackers vs. AS is frequently mentioned. You simply cannot assume that the 3rd party tracker registers clicks the same way G does.

Rest easy, you are not being duped.

[europeforvisitors]

Just out of curiosity, how do you know that your third-party click tracker is accurate, and that it counts clicks (and discards invalid clicks) in the same way that Google does?

I'm not questioning your conclusion (I have no way of knowing whether it's correct), but I can't help wondering how you reached it.

[celgins]

I wouldn't totally rely on any third-party tracker to report Google Adsense clicks properly.

Plus -- without knowing your website, or where the clicks come from, it would be difficult for anyone to speculate as to why Google is not counting (if indeed they are not counting) all of your ad clicks.

It could be anything from invalid clicks, to too many clicks originating from the same IP within a set time period.

[europeforvisitors]

The Lane's Gifts vs. Google Report by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin has a discussion of how Google counts and discards clicks. It obviously doesn't reveal any proprietary information, but it does show that the process of filtering, counting, and auditing clicks is more complicated than many people realize.

The PDF file is at:

[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[zett]

realmaverick:

Starting September 2007, I noticed that Google was (all of a sudden) not reporting all clicks any longer. Where in the past the numbers published by Google (in my reports) would exceed the numbers my commercial 3rd party tracker click tracker would count, the situation reversed in September, without me having changed or updated the tracker in any way.

Since then I see up to 17% of the clicks being "not counted" by Google (on average 5.6%). It's not as bad as in your case, but it's still significant and consistent.

I attribute this to a change in the way how Google actually counts clicks, i.e. there seem to be various quality levels of a click -"ignore click", "value of click is $0.00", "value of click is smartpriced", and "value of click is normal". The filter for the first group of clicks ("ignore") seems to have been significantly tightened by Google in September. I strongly believe that the classification of a click is linked to the origin of a click, be it a certain region, a certain network, or a certain user.

And yes, I feel duped, too.

My sites, folks, my sites! :-)

[jomaxx]

Below is another recent thread on this same problem. However in this thread the discrepancy is about 33% and zett's discrepancy was 17%, but you're seeing a variance of 300%. Thus IMO you should also be looking at where geographically your traffic is coming from, how you're driving traffic to your site, whether there are likely to be multiple clicks per user, etc.

[webmasterworld.com ]

[europeforvisitors]

I strongly believe that the classification of a click is linked to the origin of a click, be it a certain region, a certain network, or a certain user.

And yes, I feel duped, too.

If you're correct in your belief that a click's origin determines whether the click is counted, then it's likely that Google's objective is to prevent advertisers (Google's paying customers) from being duped.