Wednesday, October 01, 2008

adsense & advertising nitty gritty questions

Here's a few adsense questions that I'd love answered:

1 - When I use blogger to set up a blog and I click "add adsense", as I did on this blog, google automatically finds my adsense account and sets up the appropriate ads. Which is what I did when I went to the new blogger on this website. That's cool. But what channel does it put it under? I can't find an "other"category so I'm a little confused.

2 - If I have two google ads on the same page, as I do on this blog, and someone views a page, so that both ads are viewed, does that count as one or two page views? I've been told that it counts as one by adsense but I can't seem to find this info documented anywhere. ANSWER: It counts page impressions, not ad block impressions. But if you want ad block impressions, or even individual ad impressions, you can find this in adsense advanced settings.

3 - If a page has two or three types of adsense ads; such as adblock ads, menu ads, and a search function; will adsense count that page impression multiple times. I believe it counts it once per type of ad on the page, but I'm not sure.

The implication is that you need to be careful when you compare $ per thousand of adsense vs advertising statistics. My advertising statistics are kept as $ per thousand page impressions. A page with two ads would count each ad impression separately. So a single page impression produces two ad impressions. But, if google is counting page impressions (not per ad impression), then I need to adjust my calculations accordingly.

I can't be the only one struggling to understand these nitty gritty number issues. Am I?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Imagine that each adblock has 4 ads in it. If a person views that page, you could have either 1 impression, 2 impressions, or 8 impressions. The default in your advanced reports would be 1 (each page is counted only) but if you look down on the left above the report, there is a dropdown list where you can select whether you want to view it by page, adblock, or actual ad.

BBat50 said...

The main focus of this effort is better monetizing of http://www.vocabulary.co.il. I've moved to that new homepage from http://www.vocabulary.co.il/index_old.php

Anonymous said...

Here's another point:
There are two types of Adsense ads: the regular ones and the "menu ones". Could they be independently counted for page impression purposes? I know that they are counted independently for how many google ads you can put on a page. The limit is 3, of each kind!

BBat50 said...

How do I define the 'first' ad unit when using multiple ad units?

The multiple ad units system serves ads to each ad unit in order of their appearance in your HTML code. In most cases, this will be the same order as the ad units appear on your page. However, if your code uses DIV tags or other positioning techniques, it's possible that our system will recognize an ad unit as the first ad unit, even if it appears to the end user at the very bottom of the page. Because our system may not always fill all of your ad units on any one page, it's important that you ensure that your 'main' ad unit appears first in the HTML code.

Anonymous said...

Channels questions:

Old System: google_ad_client = "pub-numbers"; .... google_ad_channel = "..numbers";

In late 2008, Google changed the
parameter and now it is google_ad_slot = "LOTS-OF-NUMBERS";
instead of google_ad_chanel.

The ad slot is the number shown below your chanel when you open the
stats page for your account.

BBat50 said...

Here's a clearer adsense code explanation