Yesterday one of my ad's page impressions were recorded at quadruple what they should be, which brought down my CTR and eCPM severely. I checked my analytics tracking, and there was no way that many page impressions were generated. It looks like it is doing the same thing today, too. I normally have a good CTR, but this glitch is bringing it down below 1%. Anyone have any advice? Is this just a temporary glitch?
I hate contacting Adsense support for anything. I may just wait and see if it corrects itself. Has this happened to anyone else?
Maybe users are just interested in your content and browsing through your website? CTR and eCPM are not related to your CPC, so in this matter it actually doesn't matter how high they are. Adsense doesn't track unique pageviews, but each reload of an ad is being tracked as an impression. So even if you had ONE unique visitor from ONE IP, you could have 100 page impressions.
look at your server stats and see if you find anything funny. its not unusual to get sudden spike in traffic for a day or 2. if one of your article made it to digg or SU, then you might be getting lot of visitors but those traffic is known not to convert. so analyze your server stat
I have a site that has a very high CTR since it gets a lot of targeted traffic. It also has a lot of different pages. So if I want to make some changes to all the pages, I usually check and recheck the pages to make sure I made the correct changes. This can result in hundreds of page impressions by me, and since I'm obviously not clicking on my own ads it brings down the CTR. Just a thought.
This is all great advice, but I'm afraid none of it applies here. I checked my logs and stats, and I have a regular amount of traffic for the day. And I don't just have a couple of hundred too many page impressions on the ad unit, I have THOUSANDS too many. It should be around 4,000 page impressions yesterday but they recorded it as 20,000. There is no click fraud involved, so I'm not worried about my account, but I don't want to get smart priced. I heard they do that to you if your CTR is too low, and this glitch has brought my CTR down to below 1% (it is usually around 5%). Anyway, thanks for the ideas. Any more?
Well I'm going to wait until after Adsense comes back online after the maintenence and see if there is a change. Another weird thing that I failed to mention earlier: the ad unit in question said 20,000 impressions, another site's unit said 6,000 impressions, but my TOTAL impressions only said 14,000. What??? That doesn't add up. It's why I'm thinking there is a glitch of some kind. Also, this isn't affecting my earnings at all, just my CTR and eCPM. If I remember correctly there have been glitches like this in the past with Adsense and they were cleared up in a few days. I just hate to contact Adsense if I don't have to. I don't cheat the system, but I'm so nervous about getting banned that I'd rather not even bring attention to myself at all. I'm sure you all know the feeling.