Will it be my first zero-click day in many months?

[john5000]

My first website, I started it about a year ago, and put adsense on it from the very beginning.

In the first couple months traffic was a trickle, and zero-click days were common.

But for the last, probably seven months or so, I don't recall any zero-click days.

Over the last couple months, daily clicks have been from 5 to 15 clicks, sometimes more.

I'm aware that with these relatively low numbers, a zero-click day is not altogether outside of the realm of what could be considered possible.

But still, it seems odd that I have showing over 1000 impressions for today, yet zero clicks. Normally it's the case that I'd have around ten clicks with that many impressions.

I have two large square blocks at the footer of my site, very prominent, and page lengths are mostly short, so not much scrolling is needed to find the ads, sometimes no scrolling is needed.

The ads seem to be loading fine on my computer. And I don't think my site has had any downtime or latency issues today.

Couple hours are left in the day.

I've not made any recent changes to adsense code or the code of my site.

What can I do to find out if this is an anomaly, or if something is wrong? Just wait and see? Have a friend click an ad? (Would rather not, and never have.) Contact Google if this continues?

Has it ever been the case that your clicks are not applied to your account until very late in the day, or maybe even the next day?

It shows I've earned 3 pennies for today, but have zero clicks, how can this be?

Little more info: ads are text-link only, no images.

Hopefully today is just a strange day, but yowzers

[john5000]

Checking StatCounter just now after not doing so very much for a while... it was starting to feel weird like I was becoming big brother or something.

Anyway, I can see the click trails for recent visitors, and I found a couple visitors that each clicked on one ad.

One click occurred about 3 hours ago, and another occurred over four hours ago.

I'm unable to see click trail stats from earlier in the day because statcounter limits the log size.

I'm aware that StatCounter may not be the most reliable, and might report phantom clicks, or maybe all the clicks are real, I dunno.

One of these adsense clicks looks real as it was the last click in the visitors clicktrail, as if he clicked around my site for a bit, then clicked an ad and was off.

The other clicktrail shows an adsense click mid-trail, and it also seems genuine as it occurred just after the visitor performed an action (sending a message), and he was probably in a moment of wonder and wander and chose to click the ad and then he came back to my site for a few more clicks.

I've saved each of these clicktrail pages to my computer.

[john5000]

Zero clicks it was. On 1,198 impressions.

This doesn't seem right, especially with the adsense clicks I saw in the StatCounter click trails. I've been having a steady near-one-percent CTR for a long time, and suddenly yesterday had zero clicks and zero CTR on 1,198 impressions, and my traffic sources are high-quality mostly from search engines.

What would you do in this situation?

Might the clicks be applied the next day? How can I ever know?

[londrum]

maybe they will be counted later on and maybe they won't. you can't know, that is the joy of adsense.
you need to work on getting more traffic and more clicks, rather than spending a few hours worrying where 2 clicks went. all that is doing is wasting your time.

[john5000]

Thanks, and I muchly agree.

Tho, I do have an obscure sense of time, apparently, as I often discover valuable insight even through exploring the seemingly trivial. I tend not to view any time as ever being a waste. Money is not as prime a motivation for me as it seems to be for many, tho I do find it a valuable tool and will like to upgrade my toolset for some heavy construction. Hopefully some more clicks roll through and I can say fshew.

[whywhywhy]

content ereased

[edited by: whywhywhy at 9:44 am (utc) on Aug 27, 2010]

[whywhywhy]

last post posted i the wrong forum sorry

[john5000]

whywhywhy, you talking about adsense or adwords?

why ask why ask why?

------

ah, you edited while I typed... and then here I edit and type to show that I see that you edited while I typed.

[whywhywhy]

i talked about adwords, but i have problem with adsense too :-)

[netmeg]

Sometimes it happens like that. I absolutely believe that some clicks take longer to 'validate' than others. I don't have any proof that isn't anecdotal, but it stands to reason. Also, I'm heavy into AdWords advertising, and I know that many of my clients get invalid click adjustments at the end of every month. So there's some process going on somewhere. (Wouldn't in the least surprise me if Google was taking back the AdSense click within 24 hours, but waiting till the end of every month to refund to advertisers - the longer you can hold on to money, the better, and I bet all those clicks add up)

[whywhywhy]

"refund to advertisers", it's a joke, in more than 3 years i only received $0.30 for + $5000 spend...

[netmeg]

I just got $875 back on one account last month. So I guess it depends.

[john5000]

Thanks for your insights Netmeg and everyone.

Another day today starting off with zero clicks, showing 185 impressions for my site so far.

I was about to sign up to the Yahoo network but just read an article that is has been closed.

Are there any comparable alternatives to adsense?

I'm actually launching my second website today, and expect it to soon greatly surpass my first sight in earnings.

Direct advertising is looking pretty good right now, but I do like simplicity of just slapping up some adsense. Would be nice if Google didn't make it a strange labyrinth for me to get into contact with them.

I haven't checked my StatCounter stats yet today, maybe I'll do that right now.

[netmeg]

That's the thing - AdSense is what it is, and in trade for that simplicity, you give up a lot of control and transparency. Only you can decide if it's worth it to you.

There are other ad networks, but as far as I know, none pay as well or consistently as AdSense. I've never been able to get any traction in the MSN adCenter publisher network (in closed beta)

You might take a look at the item that's tacked to the top of this forum. I personally increased my AdSense earnings mightily this year, partly from adding a mobile version of one of my primary sites, and partly by consistently driving traffic from a blog fed to a Facebook fan page. On another set of sites, I'm pushing to get direct advertisers. Yep, it's a lot more work then 'set it and forget it' AdSense. But that's just the way it is.

[john5000]

A click! forty seven shiny pennies! So I guess my adsense account still has a pulse.

Yah, the simplicity of adsense is good. Thanks for the mention of MSN adCenter.

May check out the thread and see if any new bits are to be found, I think I had a look once before... I've got a good idea of what I'm doing, and of what I've yet to do.

I'm building a bunch of community/classifieds sites around niches I care about.

I think the world could benefit from a website or websites (or more of them if they already exist) that help organize the food system. Maybe an organized way to offer home grown food among neighbors, see what's growing across the street, organize group buys from local farms and such. There are so many webmasters chasing dollars building sites about things they don't care about, while I hear there are some people not having enough food. Well many of them probably don't even have internet access, but mobile phones are finding there way to farmers in the middle of nowHere. I'll get on that unless somebody else takes care of it first. Surely a massive worldwide effort could be involved. I'm not super interested in learning every spoken language, unless maybe I can easily upload them to my brain, is that kinda tech ready yet?

[johnmoose]

Yep, it's a lot more work then 'set it and forget it' AdSense. But that's just the way it is.

So true. With adsense it just means that Google gets a piece of the pie for the work they do. But if you're willing to do the work then your piece of the pie will be that much bigger.