Industry guru Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, Google AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Mp3 players, management, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft Windows.

SupportSpace: Immediate Live Tech Support. Free Assessment + $10 coupon!!

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!

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Simpy.

Categorized: Pay Per Click (PPC) (Article 3951)
Tagged:
Previous: What are the pros and cons of author blogs?
Next: I want to help answer tech support questions!

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

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

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!