Unique visitors & Impressions

[cubic]

Does Google count impressions as unique impressions only? I recently noticed that the number of impressions is equal to the number of unique visitors on our web site.

The total number of impressions on a weekday is 15-20 bigger than unique visitors (news site), but the number of impressions on Google AdSense is the same as the number of unique visitors per day.

[ken_b]

The impressions shown in your adsense stats is the number of times an adblock was shown. If you have 1 adblock on a page then the google impressions should roughly equal the number of page views for that page.

If you have 2 adblocks per page, each one counts as an impression in your adsense stats. So with multiple adblocks on a page you should see more adsense impressions than the pageviews shown in your site stats for that page.

Pages that are called from cache somewhere other than your server also result in ad impressions, but might not show up on your site server stats.

So it's possible for adsense to show more impressions that your site stats show page impressions for a given page even if you have only one adblock per page.

[cubic]

Thanks for the explanation.

I still don't understand what's going on with our site. For example, we have news.php?id=NEWS_ID which displays a news story. Now, we run one ad-unit and our news are updated daily (20-30 news stories). We get about 17k impressions on the news stories per day, but Google impressions are less than 17k.

Could it be possible because we run Google AdSense on .php page and it actually counts as news.php only?

[hyperkik]

Possibly some of your guests don't have javascript enabled, and probably some of your guests have ad blocking software which prevents the display of some ads, either of which will affect your impressions count.

[renee]

public service ads are also not counted as impressions.

[cubic]

I guess hyperkik's reply explain the different numbers. Our site has rich content, so we don't have Public Ads.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

Possibly some of your guests don't have javascript enabled, and probably some of your guests have ad blocking software which prevents the display of some ads, either of which will affect your impressions count.

hyperkik is right on the money. A couple other things that might cause discrepancy between your AdSense reports and your own tracking stats are browsers which don't support iframes and other spiders & search engine crawlers.

Hope that helps!
ASA