Do displaying no ads still count as impressions?

adsense impressions and empty ad boxes

[sallam]

Greetings

I've got 2 460 adsense banners in my forum, one displayed at top, and the other is displayed under each topic.
The one at the bottom often displays empty space, with no ads. I guess its probably because there is not much ads relevant to the topic, to cover both banners.

My Q is: do these empty banners still count as impressions?
I'm asking, because I notice that both banner channels get numbers close to each other, while the one at the bottom gets far less clicks. And its also empty in most topics.

Any tips too will be much appreciated.

[lilyfr2k]

You can easily find out by making a test: you temporarily disable the second ad and see how Google counts.

No ad no count IMHO.

[sallam]

thanks lilyfr2k for the reply.
Actually I'm having each banner in a separate channel. Thats how I noticed the number are almost the same, while my testing of page displays shows the one at bottom is empty in most pages!

[webnoob]

google doens't seem to keep a correct count of impressions from my experience.. google always show 50% less impressions than my webserver tracking software display.. webserver can show 1000 pages on a given day, google only reports 500 (sometimes less). i wonder sometimes about google's accuracy..

[nervo]

I've found out that even the ad is blank, it counts as impression.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Note that G may well not count impressions that it believes to be from robots, compromised machines, malicious attacks on a site, etc. For me those (at least the first two) would almost certainly account for more than 50% of total page "views" though I haven't checked very recently.

See if your Web stats package makes any exclusions at all.

Rgds

Damon

[mlalex]

make a seperate channel for the second ad block and check it

[mlalex]

sorry repeated

[sallam]

Yes, I already have each in a separate channel of its own.

[incrediBILL]

If Google displays a PSA or alternate ad it is counted.

I know this for fact from an answer from Google AND one of my channels is currently getting nothing but PSAs and it's counting them all.

[sallam]

no, I meant empty..zero ads.

[hunderdown]

sallam, try pulling your second ad off your pages for a while. You may find that with the reduction in impressions, your site's overall CTR will go up, especially since you weren't getting many clicks on that second ad, and that MAY increase your EPC and thus your overall earnings.

If you are earning little from that second ad, I'd try it for a week.

I don't run a forum but I have seen my site's overall earnings go up when I took ads off low CTR pages.