Adsense Stats Go Crazy

All Numbers Quadrupled

[Sally Stitts]

I checked my stats the other day and was blown away.
The CTRs were all very similar to "Real results".
But the Impressions and Clicks were ALL ABOUT 4 times greater.
Then I checked last month - it said I had made thousands instead of hundreds - again, about 4x.
Then the month before - same.

I quickly went through them all, and took screen shots of the HUGE AMOUNTS that I had supposedly made every month for the last year. In each case, the multiplier for impressions and clicks was about 3.5x to 4x.

Ahh, but alas, the stats have reverted to "real"?!?
My question is, "What was I seeing?"
Was I seeing the money I REALLY made, before some type of "adjustment" was applied?
Very disturbing.
This is serious stuff to a lot of people.
And the numbers can change with the weather?
No wonder Google craves so much secrecy.

[wonderboy]

Ooo... interesting stuff, have you asked Mr. Google?
I doubt this is the total amount that you are earning before G takes its cut, never heard of this before though.
W.

[sailorjwd]

I hope mine don't 'revert'!

[Jenstar]

Others have reported some wonkiness with stats lately (especially channels) so it could be related to that.

[Macro]

Hmm. This may be more interesting that it looks at first (and this behaviour does appear different to the wonky channel stats I've seen). It was a wise move to take screenshots. By all means bung Adsense an email. They may or may not answer with the reasons for the difference.

The jump could be caused by
1. Some completely random bug at the 'plex
2. The accidental disclosure of figures they normally don't disclose.

Working on the possibility of (2) - it could be that the higher figures were what you earned before the application of a damping factor like SmartPricing. I would keep a close hold of those figures - together with your true figures - and analyse the heck out of the stats (from your other posts you seem mad at Adsense but you also seem capable of analysing your stats :)). There could be gold in the answer if it turns out that (2) was true.

I would also compare the "reported" Adsense impressions with my server logs.

[hunderdown]

But you've also seen those same months earlier, without that multiplier, right? Or was this the first time in months that you check your stats?

If AdSense reported a quadrupling of impressions overall, I'd know that was illusory, because how could those pages be viewed so many more times than my own logs said they were?

So this sounds like a bug, not some kind of unintentional lifting of the veil, revealing mysteries mortals were not meant to see....

[Sally Stitts]

No. I'm not mad at Adsense. Just perpetually perplexed.

No. It hasn't been months.
I am a compulsive, daily stat checker.
I have volumes of data on all things Adsense.

It wasn't exactly 4x. MOST were 3.99x. Down to 3.5x.
This applies to all channels, and all days since I started 9 months ago.
Nothing below 3.5x - nothing above 3.99x.

Bug or lifting of the veil?
I wonder.

[Sally Stitts]

The "normal" figures I get proved to be inline with my logfiles.

So I conclude that this is more of a "glitch" than a "peek" inside. Still, one wonders for just what reason one's impressions and clicks get multiplied by a factor of 4, while the double-digit CTRs are all within 1%, and the CPMs are all within $1. There are only a few ways to imagine just how this could have happened.

[winglian]

were you playing around with the channels when you were looking at your stats? maybe you selected the url channel as well as the ad channel and other overlapping channels. I noticed that when I selected an ad channel and a url channel, the stats exactly double.

wing