Reporting problems with Google Adsense & Analytics

So last night I was going through my Google Adsense account and seeing how the advertisements were doing.

Overall, my page impressions (advertisements that were actually displayed to website visitors) were fairly high for what I usually see.  This past week alone I picked up a strong link for one of my sites and saw a great boost in traffic.

As great as the increase in traffic and exposure was, it sure wasn’t reflected that way in Google Adsense.

As far as I can tell I have everything set up properly in Adsense.  The advertisements are correctly displayed on my websites.  Everything on the front end looks fine as far as I can tell.  But when looking at the Google stats, it seems like almost nothing happens when people visit my sites.

For this example, on one day I had over 3,000 page impressions, but the one channel that brought in the vast majority of the traffic had absolutely nothing to display in Adsense!  From what I can tell by going through the forums, it looks like Google is no longer considering the traffic from that one high-powered link as being valid, so therefore all of the page impressions and potential advertisement clicks from that source are invalid.  Basically, they consider it as a form of click fraud or false advertising.  It’s not me clicking on ads and my account won’t get in trouble because of it, but since a lot of the traffic came from one source none of them count in my statistics.  Of course, Google will still gladly display the advertisements even though it’s not properly reporting it (and any potential clicks) on my account.

That’s what I get for posting unique content and a bunch of people from one source are interested in seeing it.

This must also be something new that changed within Google, too, since I can look at the history of this particular channel and see spikes in the past from when I also received jumps in traffic from high-powered websites.  Last Fall I had a single day when I had over 6,000 page impressions.  All of that data is correctly displayed.  Google knows about the recent surge in traffic to my site, but it’s just considering it invalid and won’t display the detailed information when I view that specific channel.

I have a feeling that the only way for me to correct this problem is to just find other ways of increasing the flow to my website through “natural” methods, and not just links from top-rated websites.  Of course, that’s easier said than done.  If it was easy then I would have retired as a millionaire a long time ago.

The good news is that the website I’m referring to has seen a steady increase in traffic from the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.  This past month has been my best one yet when looking at traffic from those search engines.  I’m constantly uploading and adding new content, and I know that over time this will continue to increase.  And the good thing about traffic from those sources is that those people are searching for something in particular and will be more likely to click on one of the advertisements, whereas traffic from said high-power websites mainly just wants to look at new pictures.  It’s traffic and word of the site will still slowly spread, but those people aren’t as willing to visit my sponsors.

My long term plans for this website in particular will include some type of user interaction feature whether its a daily article that I write and allow people to leave comments and have a discussion, or ultimately just by adding a forum.  I like the article idea since I can discuss specific ideas in particular and control the flow of discussions by staying on the hottest topics, but naturally that’s going to require more time on my part to do research and type my articles.  The forum will take longer to start and can be self-managed with volunteer moderators, but you really need a decent traffic flow and encourage people to register and begin making postings.  Without members there won’t be any discussions and the people won’t return.

Another factor is that it seems like many of the websites similar to the one in discussion here have some type of forum, whereas only one in particular uses the article system to keep the people returning.  Then again, the person who runs that website also has a lot of specific knowledge and has inside sources for even more unique material.  I can compete with that website with my articles, but it’s going to require me going all out and spending that much more time working on the website.  The good thing is that all of the articles will be full of good search terms and other SEO words and phrases.

As far as Google Analytics, I’ve noticed a similar traffic reporting problem with that service.

I know that I’ve installed it correctly, but something else is blocking or just not allowing traffic to be reported.  For the website being discussed here, the Analytics code has been inserted as instructed to on the website, but it still has absolutely nothing to report after having the code in place since I reinstalled my Joomla software over four months ago.

The Analytics has also been installed on my other websites, and it consistently under-reports the traffic on my other Joomla website and my websites that use WordPress.  I always see a much higher flow of traffic when I check on the AWstats reporting program provided by my website host.  So what’s the deal with Google and all of those fancy reporting and advertising programs?  Could this be an issue with script blocking software common on most new Internet browsers, or is it something else?

Just for fun, I registered on a free website traffic reporting website called StatCounter.  It looks like it uses a similar reporting feature like Google Analytics where you take a script and insert it into the tags on the website.  I’ll have to see if this is more accurate or if it’ll also under report the traffic like Google does.