Adense impressions off by factor of >100

[danielanaidu]

for the past 7 days the number of adsense impressions for my home page has been between 650 and 850. today adsense is reporting over 70,000 impressions for the home page. but according to analytics i have only had about 600 impressions. i have looked at my home page and it looks normal (the adsense ads are all targeted correctly to my content, no viagra ads, etc.). also when i do a search for my home page, the SERPs redirect correctly to my home page. does anyone have any idea what could be causing this ridiculous increase in impressions?

[danielanaidu]

update on this issue: i just noticed that my adsense impressions as reported in my google analytics account (my adsense and analytics accounts are linked) are only about 500 for the day. could it be just some weird reporting problem with adsense?

[johnmoose]

Did you take a look at your server stats to check on visitors, page views etc for any correlation to adsense/analytics stats?

[wyweb]

Did you take a look at your server stats

That's what I'd do also. A spike like, if it's legit, has to be showing somewhere else as well and your own logs are a good place to start.

[bumpski]

Other possibilities:

Somebody may have copied your code.

Somebody with lots of traffic is "framing" your page. (This should show up in analytics too though)

For some reason somebody is looking at your pages in the Google cache.

You can use the "allowed sites" setting to control the above "problems".

Don't forget that impressions can be reported per Page, per Ad Unit, or per Ad. I think the new interface is defaulting to "per Ad Unit". Still this wouldn't come close to your discrepancy.

[bumpski]

Other possibilities:

Somebody may have copied your code.

Somebody with lots of traffic is "framing" your page. (This should show up in analytics too though)

For some reason somebody is looking at your pages in the Google cache.

You can use the "allowed sites" setting to control the above "problems".

Don't forget that impressions can be reported per Page, per Ad Unit, or per Ad. I think the new interface is defaulting to "per Ad Unit". Still this wouldn't come close to your discrepancy.

[danielanaidu]

i just noticed that the url for my home page is /index.html, yet the page that is showing up in my adsense stats is /index.htm. it is not the same url as my true webpage. and when i type in /index.htm in the browser it gives me a 404 error.

should i just delete that channel from my adsense account? would that remove the problem?

[danielanaidu]

what i decided to do at least for now is to remove the adsense code from my home page to see if that makes the impressions stop going up.

bumpski, what do you mean by using the "allowed sites setting to control the above problems"?

johnmoose and myweb: i have checked the stats and so has my hosting company and there is no legitimate spike.

[endomorph1]

Also consider this, something is wrong with Adsense.

Since Wednesday, my account has gone plummeting downhill with impressions, clicks and earnings yet my GA stay firm !

[danielanaidu]

endomorph, i considered that as well, but i think that if there were something wrong with Adsense i would be seeing lots of other complaints here as well. and i have not seen anybody else complain about anything similar.

[danielanaidu]

update on this problem: almost 10 hours ago i turned on Allowed Sites and I am still seeing impressions (9000 impressions already over the past 3 hours). Does anyone have any more suggestions? Thank you very much.

[HuskyPup]

Does anyone have any more suggestions?

In the past I have had click attacks running into the thousands however Google has always been quick and discounted/disregarded them BUT they did leave the actual page impressions in my stats which made the CTR and eCPM look diabolical!

I did contact Google at the time and did receive a fairly quick answer confirming they knew about it.

[danielanaidu]

how did you contact them? i sent them a notification yesterday using the Invalid Click Activity contact form, even though what i have are invalid impressions, not invalid clicks. is there any other way to contact them? how long did they take to respond? thank you for your advice.

[HuskyPup]

I used the same form, it was January 2008 and they responded within 3 days.

[leadegroot]

almost 10 hours ago i turned on Allowed Sites and I am still seeing impressions

I don't know how long Google takes to action this - but I doubt it is the same day.

Are you seeing these figures on the adsense home page, on url channels or custom channels?
is it in the new interface or the old?

[danielanaidu]

I am seeing the impressions on the adsense home page and also when i look at url channels (i don't have custom channels set up). i am still using the old interface. and this morning i not only had impressions, but i also had one click, even though i removed all the adsense ads from that page 2 days ago. i am pretty confident that what is happening is the impressions are being generated by a cached version of my page. but why that cached version is being loaded so many times is the mystery.

[leadegroot]

Definitely something very strange happening - here's hoping it will turn out to be a glitch, not a problem :)

[bumpski]

Try searching for your publisher ID (number only). You'll find that in your MyAccount tab. There are sites in the results that itemize domains associated with your ID. Maybe you'll get lucky and find a surprise domain.

Since my webhost was bought out a couple years ago, it's really interesting finding out who "may" be hosting my site now! It's a complex path of hosts owned by hosts owned by hosts.

[bumpski]

Please see this Adsense post.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[bumpski]

danielanaidu

Anything new on your high impression problem?

[danielanaidu]

nothing new really. i still have not replaced the adsense code on that page, and yet i am still seeing impressions reported in adsense for that page. on dec 23 i had 9 impressions. on a page that hasn't had any ads on it in weeks. i have no idea where those impressions are coming from, so i am afraid to put the adsense code back. and also i never got any reply from google. it remains a mystery.