Second Dumbest Question Ever

Duh

[West of Willamette]

Are "impressions" defined as "number of times the ad sense banner is shown" or "number of ads shown"?

Thanks in advance.

[mack]

Impression is each advert displayed on your pages. even if the same ad is shown more than once.

Hope this is if help.

Mack.

[Jenstar]

It also seems that PSA ads are included in number of impressions, as well.

[Blue_Fin]

This is addressed in the Adsense FAQ:

Adsense FAQ [google.com]

I'm unable to hyperlink this. Maybe a Mod can help.

[Jenstar]

secure URLs (httpS://) cannot be hyperlinked here. I discovered that previously when trying to link to various AdSense information URLs.

[chiyo]

still not sure if the answer has been answered. (havent checked the link)

Does the Impressions column count the number of times the BLOCK is shown or the number of ads? For example does a skyscraper with 4 ads count as "4" or "1". Ive always assumed the latter.

[devlin]

It's the number of times the BLOCK is displayed, and not the number of ads. The FAQ says:

We count an impression when our AdSense JavaScript is actually executed by a user's browser and ads are displayed. This is generally the equivalent to a page view, but as described in question 3 below, there are instances that wouldn't execute the ad code and that would cause a discrepancy between the impressions you register and the impressions that appear in your AdSense account

The instances when a page view, as measured by our website stats, does not equate to Google's impressions are described in the FAQ thus:

We count impressions only when our ad code is executed by a user's browser. There are therefore several factors that would cause a discrepancy between the impressions you register and the impressions listed in your AdSense account. Instances that wouldn't execute the code include:

* Other spiders, robots, crawlers from other search engines
* Browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't
support JavaScript
* Browsers that don't support the <iframe> tag
* Programs that people may have written to grab website
content

Hope this clears up any misunderstandings.

D.

[chiyo]

very clear thanks Devlin. These questions come up a lot, and usually together...

This would suggest also that PSA ads would count as one impression, so CTR rate can also be affected by the proportion of your pages carrying PSA ads.

[richmondsteve]

This would suggest also that PSA ads would count as one impression, so CTR rate can also be affected by the proportion of your pages carrying PSA ads.

I have confirmed this. I removed AdSense code on all pages on a specific site except a single page. The page receives over 1,000 page views per day and even though the page has shown nothing but unpaid PSA ads the last 4 days the number of impressions in the AdSense reports have nearly matched the page views according to the server's Apache web logs. Also the CTR has been 0.0% (no clicks) even though it had historically been significant so I've ruled out paid ads showing for others or other geographic reasons.

[richmondsteve]

Since it's fairly on-topic I thought I'd mention that I've been thinking about how it's probably technically possible for a CTR higher than 100% due to how CTR is defined.

For example, if a page is viewed it counts as a single impression. If a user right-clicks on an ad, then right-clicks on another ad that should count as 2 clicks (whether Google throws out one is a different story).

2 clicks / 1 impression = 200% CTR.

I doubt a significant percentage of users right-click ads and I doubt a significant percentage of those who do click multiple ads without a page load, but I thought it was worth pointing out.