Jeremy Zawodny mentioned a pretty big discrepancy between Google AdSense clicks reported and the number of Google AdSense clicks being reported by MyBlogLog and asked what we have noticed. I mentioned that they looked pretty close to me and thought nothing of it.
Then, a post I wrote on another blog about why dads should read to their kids got a bunch of Reddit and StumpleUpon traffic that last couple days and I noticed something odd.
I ended up getting about 10X the number of pageviews over a two day period and about 2.5X today as the traffic trailed off. I’ve been getting about 15-30 AdSense clicks a day and have no reason to doubt those numbers. I know that the Reddit and StumbleUpon crowd don’t bring many clicks, but I did expect to see a very slight increase in clicks and at least end up in the upper range of clicks since the main two days were Wednesday and Thursday which are normally pretty decent days.
Instead the clicks reported by Google dropped to lower than normal (11 and 14). Strange. The following mornings I noticed something even stranger. MyBlogLog reported 23 and 33. Since MyBlogLog says which post the clicks came from, I can tell that the Google counts match up pretty closely to the MyBlogLog counts if I subtract the clicks from the hot post of the last couple days from the MyBlogLog counts. Odd.
I don’t see anything indicating that my normal search engine and normal regular visitor traffic was any lower than normal.
It makes me wonder whether Google has algorithms in place to notice when certain posts get traffic spikes and consider a higher percentage of those clicks as invalid clicks.
What would be really nice, of course, if for Google to let us see how many clicks they count as invalid.
Update: I forgot to link to the post that got Jeremy Zawodny talking about this. Dom Ramsey noticed a difference in the counts and wrote about it on his blog in this post.
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I wrote the original piece mentioned in Jeremy’s post, and that’s *exactly* what I’m seeing.
My spike from BoingBoing has now tailed off, but AdSense reported clicks are now significantly lower than before the spike. MyBlogLog still reports a healthy click level, and other sites/ads linked from the page in question are still receiving healthy clicks.
These are NOT invalid clicks, but it appears Google is counting them as such. Now I don’t know if Google is charging advertisers for these clicks, but I’m the one losing out. People are clicking AdSense ads, leaving my site, and I’m not being paid for the traffic.
Interesting Dom. I’m going to add a link to your post up above. It’s an interesting question about whether the masses coming from reddit/digg/etc should be considered valid clicks. They are certainly different readers than somebody from a search engine that is looking for something specific and maybe more inclined to really be shopping or looking for a service. It would be interesting to hear Google’s opinion on traffic spikes and AdSense.
So the lesson Google teaches us is that it’s not worthwhile to produce quality content.
I’m not sure that’s the message. Worthwhile content under that model would be fine as long as visitors found the content through the search engines instead of through the reddits/diggs of the world.
The Sloof Lirpa Center put out a (funny) warning today regarding Google AdSense code vulnerabilities.
http://www.slooflirpacenter.com
You can sign up for the coming new ad exchange from ContextWeb on the site.
Great article ! Compliments from a Dutch guy
I noticed the same thing over here and now it’s more clear to me..Thanks for the clarification !
It would be really cool to see how many clicks were invalid, and why there invalid
it would indeed be cool to see how many invalid clicks you had
You have just single handedly proved what I have been saying for the past five years.
If we break it down we are looking at blog social bookmarking members. Those very same members have their own blogs. They have each monetized their blogs to generate an income. Hoping to make a few dollars to pay their hosting accounts and maybe their ship might come in.
What I say is it is those members who refuse, flat out refuse, when they go to a site to look at an ad that might interest them.
What’s the use of monetizing your site if you don’t do for other people what you want those people to do to you.
SU and Mybloglog members will not click an ad on your site. (Unique visitor logs prove that).
Am I the only one who thinks this way? If I like a site I will click a few ads when I am finished to one; thank the owner for their efforts and two; to go to a site that interests me. I have found some great sites this way and even made a purchase.
To me that is what the system is about, not sit back, join a group and hope they will all come to you and click madly away. It does not work that way.
Wow. I’m not even really sure how to reply to that. Nowhere in the comment did I even talk about expecting people to click on ads just because they like the post. That’s not really what AdSense is about. The people that put AdSense on their blog are agreeing to blindly promote other websites. The goal should be to get the kind of traffic that has an interest in those ads because they are interested in where clicking on the ad will take them. I do not in any way support clicking on ads to reward the writer of a blog.
That said, the point of this post is that sometimes when a post gets a huge traffic spike, the amount of reported clicks tends to go down rather than up. That seems odd to me and might indicate that Google has algorithms in place to notice traffic spikes and filter out some of the clicks. Maybe they have those filters in place to prevent some of the “buddy system” clicking that you are taling about.