Unmatched Ad Requests

[dirkji]

What are unmatched ad requests?

[Leonard0]

Seems like it's a new feature in the reports.
You can see it under Ad Types in the Reports section when Columns is set to Ad requests.
It appears that Google has recently created two separate report categories - one for text ads and one for unmatched ad requests.

From what I can determine unmatched ad requests appears to be ad links, web cache and unauthorized sites. You can see the sources by selecting Sites under the Add Dimension button.

What is strange is that I have zero clicks for over 100,000 ad link impressions.
But at least now the Coverage report is more accurate for text ads - 100%.

On the left column help there is an explanation of unmatched ad requests:

Why is "(Unmatched ad requests)" displayed in my reports?

An ad request is counted each time your site requests an ad to be served, even if no ad is returned. Unless your coverage is 100%, you will have more ad requests than matched requests (ads that are returned and displayed on your site), resulting in some unmatched requests.

Some reports have columns that are meaningful only for matched requests. For example, the Targeting type report shows how ads displayed on your site have been targeted. When an ad request is unmatched, there are no ads to consider, so the request has no targeting type. This is why unmatched requests appear in a separate row.
If you're using link units on your site, unmatched ad requests might be higher than expected. This is due to the way we count a matched ad request for link units. A matched ad request for a link unit is only counted if the user clicks on a term in the link unit. If the user doesn't click, the ad request is considered unmatched. As a result, coverage is lower for link units than other ad units.

Example of unmatched requests in a report

* A user visits your site, which contains 3 ad units. As the page renders, it sends 3 ad requests.
* We only return 2 ads (because, in this example, you've blocked all relevant ads for 1 of the ad units).
* When viewing the ad request metric for your Targeting types report, you see:
o Contextual: 1 ad request
o Placement: 1 ad request
o (Unmatched ad requests): 1 ad requests

In this case, you’d keep the unmatched requests separate when you analyze how your site is performing for contextual versus placement ads because, again, unmatched requests cannot be categorized as either.
Which reports include the unmatched ad requests metric?

You can expect to see unmatched requests displayed in these reports:

* Ad types
* Targeting types
* Bid types
* Ad unit
* Ad size

[GrahamJ]

You can determine which adsense units are getting unmatched requests in the "ad units" report of performance reporting.

As you suspect, the majority of unmatched requests are on link units.