Tyler's AdSense Mystery: Can You Solve It?

Tyler's AdSense Mystery: Can you solve it?

Where to start. While I earn a modest little sum of income from the Internet, almost of it is received through private ads. Most of the rest is made from affiliating or from various ad networks. AdSense therefore accounts for but a tiny fraction of my income, yet it is the most dominant form of advertising residing on my site Movie-Vault.com

I have used AdSense on Movie Vault since 2003, and while I only used a single 468x60 at first, that gradually grew to an average of a 468x60, 250x250, and 120x600 situated per page. Some pages have more.

Now, at first glance you'd think that Movie Vault, being very content-rich with thousands of professionally written movie reviews created by Movie Vault volunteers, would be a great candidate for contextual advertising. Any maybe it still is... However, I've always received horrible payouts from AdSense. But that's not the only thing.

I've done my fair share of moving the ads around, trying different colour schemes, ad formats, and positioning - that did help a fair bit, boosting my CTR up quite a bit. Unfortunately, there is not much I can do about my niche; entertainment/movie ads it seems pay out extremely low - with an average of $0.05-$0.10 CPC.

Anyhow, continuing on with the mystery, let me give you a brief look at Movie Vault's traffic:


The chart above shows April's daily unique traffic. As you can see, it averages at 7500 uniques per day. It should be noted that approximately 45% is from Search Engines (You guys should really check this on your server too; you may be surprised how much of your 'unique' traffic is actually spiders crawling your site... ).


This chart shows Aprils pageviews. Unfortunately it isn't much more than the uniques. The daily average for pageviews is 20,000. Note this.


Here now is where the mystery breaks from the darkness. The image above shows April's AdSense earnings for Movie-Vault ads only. It appears that a daily average of 2,000 page views are shown here, which doesn't add up to the daily 20,000 that Urchin (among other programs/sources) states.

This isn't a recent bug or anything; I've always noticed this, but have always just shrugged it off as I assumed that it'd be foolish to second-guess Google. But things just don't add up. I finally decided to ask for public help after speaking with Mooky last night on AIM; he didn't have an explanation either.

So I of course did some more digging around:


This is from April as well. There is only one change from this image from the last - it displays the Ad unit impressions instead of the page impressions. Now, according to the above image, this appears to make sense as I do have multiple ads per page. However, this still only calculate to around 2,000 pageviews per day.

Why is this happening?

Why does AdSense only seem to see a small fraction of my ads, 10% to be exact? Yes, I have AdSense on every single of my pages on the site. The only exception would be that I only have 1 468x60 on the forum, which doesn't get a massive amount of traffic, and on the staff admin pages, which doesn't get a whole lot of traffic either, there is only a 468x60 ad. This does not add up.

The only real thing I can think of are defaults. You know, those public service ads and whatnot that Google displays when they don't have an appropriate or filled advertiser to display. Now, sure, this would all make sense.. however.. I highly doubt that AdSense shows these defaults 90% of the time.

So, I'm looking for answers people I'm completely lost here. What am I missing here? I'm obviously missing something... aren't I? Or is this normal? Does this happen to everyone?

I'd love to try YPN but alas it is still in Beta and I'm not an American. I'm frustrated here earning a nickle or dime per click, and having AdSense only show 10% of my actual pageviews.

If anyone knows an answer to this, or if this is normal, please let me know!

Thanks in advance