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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.

Dave's Answer:

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:

Page Impression -- how many times the page or pages containing the AdSense advertisement was shown to visitors
Clicks -- the number of times someone actually clicked on an advertisement
Page CTR -- the resultant click-thru rate, as a percentage
Page eCPM -- the effective cost per thousand (M = mil, it's Latin) for your ad space. This is a statistic that only a marketing person could love, so it's fine if you ignore it, but it can show you what ads / ad units are most valuable, particularly if you use channels
Your earnings -- no explanation needed. Bigger is better. :-)

I hope that helps clarify how to read these Google AdSense reports!

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Comments

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 PM

Hi Dave,
Ok I am fairly new with adsense.I do have an account and its running ok.my question is…If I have few pages in my site which are almost identical ( I have a good reason for having those, but lets not go there).obviously I have Google ad sense code only one of those. Now can I show other ads like say Yahoo on pages which are same where ad sense running?
I hope I am clear enough what I am trying to ask.
By the way...you are the greatest

Posted by: Dave at January 19, 2007 4:05 PM

Thanks. That clears up a lot about page impressions.

Posted by: Paul at June 27, 2007 5:58 PM

Dave help me check my site and advise me about marketing in blogs,google adsense,and General ranking
awaiting and thanks alot
chris from kenya

Posted by: chris mbogo at August 9, 2007 12:24 AM

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 AM

i 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 PM

H1! 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 PM

Salman, 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 AM

thanxxxx

Posted by: ahmad at May 9, 2008 9:06 PM

hey Dave....
I have subscribed for adsense in my blog,

http://fungusoffline.blogspot.com

I have a query about page impressions....

Does the page impressions count changes per day????
how does it change??
earlier in my blog it was 22 but when i did a little postioning it dropped to 18 next day

Posted by: Sanyam bhasin at July 25, 2008 4:36 AM

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 PM

Aha! Finally. I've understood these terminologies that are almost rocket science to me.

Posted by: Jigs Garcia at November 1, 2008 4:39 AM

Hi 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 PM

hi 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 PM

Hey! Dave
I'm new to google adsense my website is a social networking. My page views of a single day is about 10000, but my google adsense impression shows only 4000-5000 impressions.
Could you tell me why?

Posted by: Nishant Johar at December 26, 2008 3:58 AM

very informative.

Posted by: Justin at December 31, 2008 6:51 AM

Nishant, 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 AM

Very 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.

Posted by: Jared|SpeakWealthNow at January 15, 2009 7:49 AM

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 PM

Dave, 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 PM

Dave, what do you consider to be a 'good' realistic CTR to aim for with Adsense?

Posted by: Paul at February 5, 2009 5:33 PM

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 AM

Hi Dave,
No question--just a big thank you for the obviously large amount of time you put in answering folks questions. I found the answer to things that had been puzzling me just by reading your answers to others. You make Adsense almost intelligible to us novices.
Best regards,
Dr. Bill Brown
Xiamen University (China; I like chai too!).

Posted by: Bill Brown at April 18, 2009 4:14 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!