
What's a Google AdSense "Page Impression"?Dave, I finally signed up and have a Google AdSense account, but I'm confused by all of the terminology in their reports. For example, what's a Page Impression versus an Ad Unit Impression? Thanks for any help you can offer. I've written extensively about Google's AdSense program (read all about Google AdSense). It's very cool, but, you're right, it can be very confusing if you're not used to thinking like a marketing and advertising maven. Further, they only today announced some changes to their reporting that is intended to clarify exactly what's what, including what they now call an "Ad Unit Impression". Let's start with that, shall we? Here's how Google explains the difference between a Page Impression and an Ad Unit Impression: There's a new option in your reports that allows even more accuracy in your tracking. We've introduced the concept of 'Ad Unit Impressions' to complement the current 'Page Impressions' in your reports. Until now, your AdSense 'page impressions' reflected the number of times the AdSense code was triggered. This meant that multiple ad units on a page would log up to 3 'page impressions' in your reports, when only a single page view had taken place in a user's browser. Page impressions are now just that - the number of page views we detect. Ad Unit Impressions are the new name for the old behaviour: one impression logged for each ad unit shown. Got it? In general, AdSense reports show the following fields of information:
I hope that helps clarify how to read these Google AdSense reports!
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Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader. Good article Dave! I just added adsense and looked at my page CTR. If anyone knows, on average what is a good long term page CTR? Posted by: John at June 6, 2006 9:39 PMHi Dave, Thanks. That clears up a lot about page impressions. Posted by: Paul at June 27, 2007 5:58 PMDave help me check my site and advise me about marketing in blogs,google adsense,and General ranking So is it better to show just one adsense in a page or more than one adsense? Thank you. Posted by: Jake at August 20, 2007 11:16 AMi have my web site i am working at still 5 months last 2 months i have lots of traffic and i have total 27500 page impressions but my Ecpm is not good its 0.45 and i am earned 129 dollers with 3000 clicks so i am very upset that how can i make good money and good ecpm Posted by: salman at September 6, 2007 3:54 PMH1! Please sugest how can i improve my ads click.i have good keyword ranking in Search engines. total Impressions 850 but only 30 click. Posted by: Triloki SIngh at March 3, 2008 10:31 PMSalman, your eCPM is basically a measure of how valuable your keywords are so if you're seeing < $1 eCPM it suggests to me that you should be focusing on a different topic area if your goal is to make more money. Triloki, your effective click-thru rate (CTR) from your figures is 0.03 or 3% which isn't bad, actually. You can increase that by trying different ad placements or sizes, but i would suggest that you now need to focus on driving more quality traffic to your site: imagine if you have 850/day instead of per month, for example. Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 4, 2008 6:23 AMthanxxxx Posted by: ahmad at May 9, 2008 9:06 PMhey Dave.... http://fungusoffline.blogspot.com I have a query about page impressions.... Does the page impressions count changes per day???? Hi, Please view my blog. I want to display google adds releted to the words in my blog. But its displaying just stupid once. Can you please guide me that how to display relevant adds and also if there was no add available then the add unit change in any color. Thanks & Regards, Posted by: samia at October 11, 2008 7:16 PMAha! Finally. I've understood these terminologies that are almost rocket science to me. Posted by: Jigs Garcia at November 1, 2008 4:39 AMHi there, I'm still confused about something. I was wondering if you could help? In the report area of Ad Sense, under Page impressions it shows a number. Does that number include the fake impressions that are caused by me clicking on my page to check the look and design of my page? Or is that number the amount of views my page got exclusively, from other people? Thanks so very much! Posted by: CKP at November 19, 2008 1:03 PMhi i want to ask, i m new on adsene, my relatives visited my site and also they clicked on google add but in my account page impressions 5 and clicks showing me 0. Why ????? y clicks r still 0 ? can someone tell me ? pl..... Posted by: Rahim at December 20, 2008 8:15 PMHey! Dave very informative. Posted by: Justin at December 31, 2008 6:51 AMNishant, please see this: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/google_adsense_page_impressions_equal_page_views.html I think it'll address your question. :-) Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 3, 2009 7:25 AMVery straight to the point. Google adsense reflects the page impressions according to its own accuracy. There are tools that will show you their own "accuracy" results but you have to remember that they are different from each other. Google has its own way of detecting how many impressions you have in a day. Is it normal to have about 10% of my traffic make a AdSense page impression? I have about 10 times the amount of traffic to my website than what shows up in my AdSense page impressions. Posted by: Dave at January 23, 2009 5:03 PMDave, sounds like Google just can't fill ad inventory for most of your traffic. Do you get lots of visitors from overseas? Are you in a topic area that doesn't have many advertisers? Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 23, 2009 9:20 PMDave, what do you consider to be a 'good' realistic CTR to aim for with Adsense? Paul, that's sooooo context dependent that it's very hard to say. I would suggest that if you are finding good, well watched ads on your pages, then you should expect to see at least a 1% CTR if the ad block is well positioned. I see higher CTR and have heard that the average CTR across the AdSense network is approximately 2%, but I can't confirm that. I would suggest you experiment with ad block placement and colors, etc, to maximize your results with these advertisements. I have lots of articles about AdSense here on the site too. Try this link: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/cat_pay_per_click_ppc.html Hope that's helpful! Posted by: Dave Taylor at February 6, 2009 9:35 AMHi Dave, Hi Mr.Dave... i'm vijay 4rm india, i'm new to adsense and blogs i have created one blog on Animation,(http://animation-anima.blogspot.com)i wanna keep free tutorials on animation maya,adobe flash photoshop,3ds max etc... which sites r best to keep hyperlinks in my blog. I wanna make my BLOG popular plz tell me some SEO tips.One week back only i created my blog and the Total Earnings r 12$ only.Per click i'm earning few cents only.Plz tell tips to gain more. Thank you for this wonderful post. Do you have any suggestion on how to increase google adsense on my site www.surforeo.com. for example placemnt of add themes etc. Posted by: surforeo at August 2, 2009 7:35 AMTHX DUDE Posted by: Jaylen at August 4, 2009 9:17 AMDave, My page impressoins severely disagree with the number visits that Google analytics says I have. The number of visits (and pageviews) is consistent with Anatlytics, but the page impressions are up and down, giving me the sense that it is AdSense (and not Analytics) that is in error. When my impressions are down, so is my revene...even though my # of vists and page views are still up. What gives? Posted by: Rico at August 7, 2009 6:00 PMHi Dave! I really like your site and I love reading your tech guidelines. Anyway, I just wanna ask. How can I get more traffic for my site? I badly need more visitors. Thank you! Posted by: Boffill at August 17, 2009 1:40 AMI've been looking around at what people are saying about AJAX and adsense. Apparently they aren't quite getting along yet.. for obvious reasons. Some are taking the approach of placing ads into iframes and refreshing through js function. anyways.. might be in the wrong thread.. but i'm kind of not sure about something. if i've got a page with minimal static content.. and a div that fills by ajax.. and my ads in turn are not being refreshed throughout the clients visit.. wouldnt this take an affect on my impressions and ctr? like dramatically decrease impressions.. and if ads are being used correctly, increase ctr? and if this is the case.. would google have a problem there? Posted by: rob at August 17, 2009 1:51 AMi have blog online news i want to know how i prmot my blog Posted by: manish at August 17, 2009 12:39 PMi wonder y my ads dont display in my blog when i view from mobile Posted by: jim at September 2, 2009 2:04 AMI got all my adsense inplaced but my click is very low.How am I going to market my site? anyway a big thankyou on your explanations to others and it really help me Posted by: dzai at September 8, 2009 5:09 PMHi Dave, please how does page eCPM affect my earnings? Please note that the channel data in your report below may overlap if ads are tracked by multiple channels. Only your aggregate reports will be used to calculate payments.its shows on my account wht is the matter can anybody help Posted by: nazir at October 14, 2009 11:12 PMThanks all for make thing clearer to me i always use ur blog for query resolution but never coment.....but seriously u r always helpfu.... Posted by: Raman from india at October 25, 2009 9:39 AMi don't know how to do impression plz help Posted by: nabin at November 2, 2009 8:10 PM3% is good CTR??? NOWAY!! I have figured out how to make mine 40 to 50% every single time. For me, 15% is bad. 3% means that you don't know what you're doing in my opinion. I'm listing some adsense data from one of my websites last month - channel00 17,646 2,015 11.42% $46.17 $814.71 really thanks, i got some informative tips about google adsense. Posted by: ASAD at January 5, 2010 11:21 PMThanks Dave, that cleared up a lot of questions for me. I get a lot of page impressions with no CTR. I'd like to improve this, but I get stuck easily on how, so there it is. Posted by: Keith at January 13, 2010 9:16 AMThank you! Very helpfull info. Posted by: Paul Z at January 16, 2010 4:32 AMHi Dave, good thread. Is there a way to turn OFF adsense so that impressions are not counted when I visit the page... i.e. tell adsense to ignore my site impressions? Two questions please! hi i must know if i got this right. does 3 impressions count as: i have 3 links in my ad box and one person viewed my page. OR. I have three ad boxes and one person view my page. I have just started using google adsense, and my site is really new. The stats show 144 page impressions, but the earnings indicate 0. What page view rate do I have to reach to start earning money? Posted by: Tim Toady at February 25, 2010 10:13 AMShelly, you can't sell ad space other than encouraging them to go through AdWords and explicitly target your site. Even then, though, Google will take it's slice of the revenue. Tom, an "impression" is a "viewing of an ad unit", so if you have three ad units on your page, yes, that one visitor can produce three ad impressions. Tim, you don't earn money by displaying AdSense ads, you earn money by your readers clicking on the advertisements. Note that you can't encourage people to do so with things like "please click on our ads to help support the site": that's a violation of the AdSense terms of service. Good luck! Posted by: Dave Taylor at February 25, 2010 10:31 AMI have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...
I do have a comment, now that you mention it!
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