Adsense inflated pageviews count as a result of passbacks

[Munix]

Hi,
I've encountered an issue and hopefully you might be able to help me.
Up until few days ago I only used adsense, and now I started using Sovrn as well. Altogether I'm quite pleased with Adsense so I wanted to move in to it with caution.
I put one sovrn ad with an adsense passback code and set a floor price (relatively high).
From revenues point of view it works as expected: sovrn returns an ad only part of the time with high CPM and moves back to adsense the rest.
My problem is wth the statistics: it seems that adsense count these passbacks as a different pageview than the other adsense ads on the page, causing inflation of pageviews reporting, and as a result a drop in CTR and RPM.... which may not hurt actual revenues but is very confusing.

Did any of you encounter such an issue and is there a solution?
Thanks!

[LuckyD]

That's exactly what started happening to my account starting Friday, although I have been using AdSesen as a passback for a bit longer already.
Would appreciate it if someone could jump in and help to explain why that's happening (and whether passbacks are really the cause here)

[Munix]

That's interesting. In your passbacks - Are you using sync or async ads (in both adsense and the other network)? I'm using async in both and thought it might has something to do with it

[LuckyD]

Using async in both cases. Everything was working just fine up until Friday. Maybe Google started counting pageviews differently or something else happened?

[Munix]

I think it looks better now. I changed the second ad agent to sync, but I doubt it has anything to do with it. Did anything change on your end?

[LuckyD]

Do you use Komoona by any chance?

[Munix]

No. Only adsense and sovrn

[LuckyD]

Word of advice, drop sovrn if you can.
Slows down your website a lot, plus I heard that there's an issue with their publisher agreement, that contains some sketchy stuff (found that out on WebmasterWorld after removing their tags).
I use Komoona, and if you have enough traffic, they will accept you. Fill rates are not that great, but the CPMs are.

[LuckyD]

Found the link to the discussion: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Munix]

Thanks. I was approached by Komoona once but didn't like the fact that they pay net 60.
So far Sovrn seem ok, but I'm keeping a close look on speed, ad types and so on.

[Munix]

Just to update in case someone else is having (or will be having) the same issue:
I verified that the inflated pageviews count in adsense was a result of having Sovrn installed as async and passing-back to adsense.
Once I changed Sovrn to sync (which is less recommended than async) - the problem was resolved.

I guess the same issue can occur with other ad agencies as well: since async in these cases usually means iframe, then the passback to adsense is called from a remote page (the iframe) and adsense is having trouble correlating this call with the other calls from the same page.
Perhaps if all the ads are set as passbacks and not just part of them - the issue won't occur either.