Adsense Revenue from Phantom Website?

I'm looking at my adsense stats today and I have 2 clicks and 200 impressions from somewhere I can't figure out. I have adsense on 4 websites which I have broken out into URL channels how these two clicks are not on any of the URLs.

Is there anyway to figure out where these might be coming from?


thanks

Jim

 

Uhhh sounds scary! J/k

 

Funny you should say this.
I’ve been noticing the same thing for three days now, and have been blaming myself for having the wrong code on some page that is now getting visitors!
I guess I should stop blaming myself then.
raz

 

Hi Shannon,

Haven’t seen you at seochat for a while.

Mine is more like 2 to 3 clicks that are not in any channel. If someone copies the code the channel info will also be there…

raz

 

glad to hear someone else noticed this

I've double checked all my sites and I have them all accounted for. maybe I should email google, they're actually quite responsive.

 

ok now its 3 clicks and 400 impressions :O
damn you phantom website! (but thanks for the cash I guess)

 

Don't worry Smyrl, if they are URL channels, then it would still show up as phantom clicks. Only if they were "old-fashioned" hardcoded channels would this apply.

jiminoc, are you using URL channels? and if so, do you have any subdomains in your sites?

 

Yep, I'm experiencing it too.

 

no subdomains in my url channels

 

Well then, do you think someone copied your code? Try doing some google searches for some phrases found on your website (exact searches with quotes) and see if someone jacked your content and missed some of your adsense blocks.

 

Great. You're getting 1 extra click for every 100 impressions. Are you complaining?
I have 2 click in 116 impressions. I guess I'm lucky today

 

no complaining, just trying to figure out where the hell they're coming from so I know whats making me money lol

I searched for my pub id on all the search engines and came up with nadda. I dont see why someone would copy my articles with my google ads but if they did.. .thanks!

 

Maybe they are from a cached google, yahoo or msn page before you added channel tracking?

 

It is a common problem from what I have read and what I see in my own stats (running adSense on 4 sites ATM with URL channels). Some visits + clicks are missed by the URL channels... I find making "custom channels" which you can give more helpful names like "the shopping site" instead of a long URL work better, you make them in the:
AdSense for Content -> Manage Custom Channels

and when you make a content ad:
AdSense for Content -> Ad layout code

you select the custom channel from there, this adds a line of code to the block of code you put in your pages HTML.

My "guess" as to why URL channels miss some is that some browsers may not pass the current page URL to the adSense ad, whereas the custom chan code is a fixed number "hard coded" in to the ads code.

Just remember when making other sites to not just copy the code from your existing site, you will need to make a new custom channel and re-generate the code. It is better to use custom channels, then you have real control and can break a site down into different areas if you wished too.


// afterthought...
Maybe someone is linking to your pages but in a frame (to retain a link back to their site at the top of the page) and the Google ads see their URL and therefore do not put it in the URL channel. Using custom channels would solve this too.

 

Another thing that I think happens (but I have not confirmed this) is that if you have your URL channel as "www.example.com" and someone gets to your site by typing "example.com", you will not see those impressions in your channel. If you use "example.com" as your URL, you will get all the impressions in the channel.

 

This is correct

 

I too have been noticing this, and I use asrep for my google stats so I know which sites are generating the clicks, but when I take a look at the site there is no hint of my publisher ID?
This has been puzzling me for a while, I only get a few clicks a week though

Sara

 

The most common reason is Google/MSN/Yahoo cache. When you have URL channels, those stats will not show up, since the actual URL is the search engine's domain. Any clicks or impressions go towards your account, but won't be attributed to any of your URL channel.

If you have been with AdSense long enough that your AdSense code shows on pages at archive.org, you can rack up impressions and clicks there too.

There is always the chance someone copied a page/site with your AdSense code, but I have only seen that in a couple of cases... usually they swap publisher IDs

If you use custom channels, they will be properly attributed to channels, regardless of what the URL is.