When I look at my stats, I see that there were a higher number of click-thrus on Adsense ads than it shows in Google's Adsense panel. My stats say that 25 adsense ads were clicked, but Google says only 5. Does Google discount some clicks at random?
From what I've heard, Google will discard invalid clicks. For instance, if someone clicks twice, or it is clear that they wouldn't usually go on the site (for instance, if someone who only ever browses mobility scooters they are unlikely to click on an ad for super cars)
No, not at random. It does exclude invalid clicks, however. How are you determining that there were more clicks than what Google is telling you? Some scripts that supposedly count clicks actually count every time the cursor passes over an ad, so that might be part of the problem.
i wonder what criteria it uses to determine "invalid clicks", especially since everything G does is done at the programmatic level.