Google AdSense is the most popular and most widely used ads network on the Internet that serves context sensitive ads on a very large number of websites. Usually, when you check your statistics of AdSense impressions (i.e., the number of views of pages on which the ads were displayed) and the number of page views as seen from your website logs or even from Google Analytics statistics, you may see a marked difference between these figures. Website publishers who are new to AdSense find it difficult to understand and appreciate this difference and the reasons for that.
Let me try to explain the reasons for the difference between the following two categories of data:
Some of the reasons for this difference are as under:
(1) The number of page views displayed by website logs, etc., may include pages viewed by search engine crawlers such as Google Search’s Googlebot or similar other crawlers. These page views are by machines and not by human beings. Typically the number of such machine visits that access your raw web pages may constitute even up to 25% – 30% of the total number of page views shown in the website logs, though this number may vary substantially from site to site. On the other hand, Google AdSense impressions will not include the number of pages accessed by these search engine spiders, since no AdSense ads are displayed by Google on such page views.
(2) AdSense uses JavaScript to serve ads, as you can notice by examining the HTML code of your web pages. Now, there are many people who don’t enable JavaScript on their browsers. Thus, such people will not be able to view ads when they visit your website. My personal experience has been that about 5% of the total number of visitors might have disabled JavaScript in their browsers. Of course, this number will again vary from site to site.
(3) Many people use ad-blockers in their browsers (typically in Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers). While I don’t have any idea as to what is the percentage of people who use different types of ad-blockers while browsing the Internet, I may mention that just one particular ad-blocker add-on on Firefox has as many as 61 million total downloads for Firefox browsers, at the time of this writing! And, remember Firefox has only about 25% market-share of the browsers. So, you can well imagine that the number of people using ad-blockers could possibly be in the range of about 5% or so of the total number of Internet users. This is just my guess-work and my guess may be drastically different from the actual figures.
(4) There are people who access the Internet from their mobile phone devices. In view of compatibility problems, Google AdSense may not find it possible to serve ads for these users. So, some difference will possibly be caused by the number of pages viewed by such people.
(5) Then there are occasions when Google may not have sufficient ads to show for the specific contents of your web pages. It may be due to less number of advertisers bidding for the keywords used on your web pages. Or, may be due to the fact that their ad budget may be for a limited number of ads that may get exhausted soon and therefore all pages viewed on your site may not be in a position to get ads. Again, it depends on the category or subject area in which your site operates. To be fair, my general experience has been that Google ads inventory is sufficiently large. This is for the simple reason that if sufficient number of advertisers don’t bid for any particular keywords, their bidding rates may go down drastically in the Google AdWords bidding which may then attract more advertisers. So, the market dynamics of demand-supply may ensure that Google AdSense has sufficient inventory. However, for some typical keywords, or for some specific categories / subjects, the number of advertisers may be genuinely less. In any case, the fact remains that this may also be a reason, though apparently this may not have a substantial effect.
(6) Many advertisers restrict the regions in which their ads are to be shown. Many of them do not want to show their ads for some particular countries. On the other hand, some advertisers may be interested in showing their ads only in one country where their company’s operations are concentrated. So, sometimes, if your web pages are being visited in such countries or regions for which sufficient number of advertisers have not submitted their bids, those particular web pages may possibly go without any ads from Google.
(7) Some pages on site may be displaying the “Public Service Ads” or the PSA’s. These are free ads that may be displayed (depending upon your settings) by AdSense when no paid ads are available or could be shown due to various reasons. Such reasons could be that your site has content that does not comply with AdSense policies, all pages on your site might not have been crawled yet, your web pages may contain some sensitive information for which no relevant paid ads could be shown, your website uses frames with content in one frame and AdSense code in another frame, your setting allows image ads only but no image ads are available, your web page may not contain enough content to target context sensitive ads, etc. It is not clear from the Google AdSense website whether the PSA’s are counted in the AdSense impressions.
To conclude, in view of the above reasons it is quite possible, or rather it is quite natural and expected, that the number of AdSense impressions would generally be less than the number of page views reported by website logs or other services such as Google Analytics, sitemeter, statcounter, etc.
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