My Adsense stats are much closer ... within 10% ... to Viisitorville then they are to SBI. I believe SBI uses Webalyzer and Webalyzer doesn't differentiate between real and bot traffic. So I feel VV and Adsense are more accurate overall for determining real traffic.
The problem is in the stats package, not the site, or hosting in this case, IMO so supplemental tracking is nice to have.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
On the other end of the spectrum....when looking at my AdSense statistics for this month to date, there are four days when AdSense impressions are about 10 times (yes, 10 times) more than my average daily impressions. Yet my site statistics doesn't show a big surge in traffic for those days.
Changes are coming to AdWords that will likely positively affect AdSense publishers who are prepared. My advice to everyone is to stick to the fundamentals and focus your time and energy on building good quality content pages instead of wasting that time and energy speculating about causes of traffic/impression differences.
Where have all my AdSense impressions gone? Test Results.
I am posting these test results for anyone interested. The problem is that Google Adsense ads are not showing on all the page views that they should.
Reasons per Google:
? Other spiders, robots, crawlers from other search engines
? Browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't support JavaScript
? Browsers that don't support the <iframe> tag
? Programs that people may have written to grab website content
Other probable reasons:
The ads are being blocked by the overeager firewalls, anti-virus, and adblocking software people have on their computers.
Test Results
Page views by free visitors from various sources:
On 30% of my page views the Google ads never displayed for my visitor.
Each visitor looked at 3 pages.
30% loss stinks but I don?t see what can be done about it. Now look what happened when I bought some clicks for a penny each at a PPC SE, Brainfox. There was a small amount of free visitors mixed in here (maybe 1 in 20) because I couldn?t separate them out.
Page views by ?visitors? from Brainfox:
On 70% of my page views the Google ads never displayed for my visitor.
Each ?visitor? looked at 1.3 page.
It?s clear to me that most of the ?visitors? from Brainfox are not real people.
Either Brainfox is deliberately defrauding me with fraudulent clicks that register a visitor and a single page view while not triggering Javascript.
OR
The ppc Search Engines are overrun with outside automated software rooting through the SE listings looking for whatever and generating false visitors along the way.
My host is SBI and their visitor count very accurately matches the number of visitors that I purchased. I trust SBI stats.
Side note: This might also explain why the 5,000+ ?visitors? I sent to SBI from Brainfox had virtually no repeat visits and zero sales. It was just a test and I did not really expect much from it but now I realize that 9 out of 10 were probably NOT EVEN REAL PEOPLE!
So now I have to ask myself, are all ppc SE going to be like this? That would certainly be disappointing. I was hoping to make some use of them.
I think the larger portion of missed impressions are the bots that are recorded as visits in the SBI stats, they won't trigger the javascript as I mentioned before.
These bots come from a variety of sources, not just search engines, such as link exchange programs that spider sites, Alexa, Top site spiders, the Google Adsense Mediabot, etc.
The thread I posted earlier regarding posts at Sitepoint explains that different stats programs record different things. Visitors aren't necessarily real people with all of them.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
I think the larger portion of missed impressions are the bots that are recorded as visits in the SBI stats, they won't trigger the javascript as I mentioned before.
Are you referring to bots that go directly to my site? If so, then I agree that is probably a large portion of the 30% missing impressions along with the firewalls and javascript blocking, etc.
But as to the ppc SE where I buy, say, 5000 clicks - I know I got the clicks because SBI records 5000 visitors from the SE. But I get only 1500 impressions. That's about 1/7 of the impressions that 5,000 free visitors would have generated. I can't attribute that huge discrepancy to legitimate bots.
Why would that many bots go to the SE, troll through the listings clicking on them? The only one who benefits from that is the SE itself. I have been doing a little research on click fraud and I am convinced that this has to be what is going on here.
Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 111 Location: Eastbourne, UK
Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 8:50 am Post subject:
Do you ever see public service ads on your site? I have a feeling these don't get included in the AdSense impressions stats.
We suffer from the same problem as there are no relevant ads for a lot of our pages. Coupled with the fact that we get a lot of foreign visitors we probably get about 1/6 of the impressions we should do.
Remember that AdSense ads are geotargetted so the ads will be different for any visitors outside your own country/region.
I'm not saying that this is a definate cause of your problems but it's something else to think about.
Kev _________________ http://www.bn23.com - Directory, Webmail and Search - Now with express inclusion & direct links
Peter I didn't respond to your PPC info as this thread is about Adsense Impressions. _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Joined: 11 Jul 2003 Posts: 126 Location: Redondo Beach, CA
Posted: Fri May 21, 2004 12:43 am Post subject:
I closely monitor my performance and while I have seen a drop, I consider it statistically insignificant. Anything in the 5%-10% range can be overcome by factors such as PPC bidding, account depletion, the weather, etc. For May, I've seen a 5% or so drop in PPC value compared to April, which was about 5% over March.
That said, the number of clicks is also up, so my effective revenue will be higher by about 5% over last month assuming we continue as we have for the last few weeks - but then again this month has 31 days... Using an effective CPM value is more accurate, and I'm running 2% below last month. I'm happy with that considering last month set records for effective CPM and earnings per click. _________________ Brad Waller | VP, Business and Affiliate Development
http://EPage.com - Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdConnect.com - Fully custom outsourced Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdJungle.com - Manage & sell your site's banner - now with PPC text ads!
If my calculations are correct, Google's income went from $300mil per year to $900 mil per year with the addition of Adsense.
If they can cut commissions by 30% across the board, that's something like $240mil in profit added with no costs against it. Remember, Google is soon to be a publicly traded company and profit is not spelled prophet anymore... not even by Bezos. Google's reason for existence is now shareholder value, not search technology or being the leader of the free internet world.
We can do nothing but wait for Yahoo/Overture to launch a competing service for publishers...
Joined: 21 Nov 2003 Posts: 581 Location: Kamloops, Canada
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 4:50 pm Post subject:
WHat is up????
After 24 hours my stats are really changing.
Yesterday I checked my stats for the day before and when I check the same day today my impressions are down 20%, clickthroughs down to 1/3 of the day before and rev is 1/8 of what it was.
I can understand how it would increase over a day or two as all the info is processed but how does it decrease this much. Is google deciding after the fact that the aren't going to count some of this activity?
Frustrating!! _________________ Hmmmmm. This is boring
Joined: 11 Jul 2003 Posts: 126 Location: Redondo Beach, CA
Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 8:43 pm Post subject:
I have not seen any revisions of my account, and I check it regularly. Is it possible that you saw the bottom line and assumed it was for "today", but it was really "yesterday"? I have checked in the middle of the day and when I view "Last 7 days" they are now showing the last 7 complete days. They used to show 7 days including "today", so the bottom line would not be a complete day. If you view "This month", you get today's numbers.
I did get confused when they started doing this and I saw a different number for what I thought was "Today". _________________ Brad Waller | VP, Business and Affiliate Development
http://EPage.com - Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdConnect.com - Fully custom outsourced Classifieds and Auctions
http://AdJungle.com - Manage & sell your site's banner - now with PPC text ads!
Actually I think there have been some good, solid explanations about the differences between site page views and Adsense impressions. the best explanation for such a big discrepancy that I can think of is the way the hosts tracking records spiders and bots that traverse your site. Spiders and bots don't trigger javascript, so Adsense impressions won't record. The question is, has anyone bothered to test it?
I've never thought of it before, but I just checked the May stats for one of my sites and it turns out that AdSense's impression numbers are consistently at about 50% of the server's throughout the month even when I've excluded the (few) bot hits.
I'm not sure how important this is. If it's just Google impressions stats that's out of whack I see no need to worry. After all AdSense isn't a pay-per-impression program.
OTOH, if this means half my visitors don't see the ads, it's definitely a matter for serious concern. _________________ Frank Nordberg
http://www.musicaviva.com
The internet center for free sheet music
Another thing I've noticed is that the final stats for each day do not show until several hours after midnight. I've stopped checking during the day because it's depressing!! Sometimes I check it at midnight and the numbers are really low, then the next day they're up where they're supposed to be. (thank goodness)
Another thing....they've posted two "payment approval" dates for May???
Another thing I've noticed is that the final stats for each day do not show until several hours after midnight.
Yes, it's been that way for months now. Adsense is still much quicker to update the stats than most advertising networks though, so I don't tink we should complain too loudly about that.
Quote:
Another thing....they've posted two "payment approval" dates for May???
It's been mentioned in another thread here as well. I wonder if it means they'll be sending two checks. _________________ Frank Nordberg
http://www.musicaviva.com
The internet center for free sheet music
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Google's reason for existence is now shareholder value, not search technology or being the leader of the free internet world.
