This makes no sense at all. Page impressions info from AdSense help- Page impressions are reported every time a user views a page displaying Google ads. We'll report only one page impression no matter how many Google ads are displayed on a page. For example, if a page with one half banner and one vertical banner is viewed once, we'll display one page impression. So even if you have 3 ad units per page it only counts as one page impression. Your examples both result in 1 impression per visitor, not what you list above. That is unless your dealing with frames, which I don't think you are. If I'm understanding you correctly you think using a server side include for your footer and header means those ad units on pages 1,2,3 etc... use the exact same code as pages 4,5,6 etc..., basically every page uses the same AdSense code. And this means Google counts the impressions for this specific code (header and footer separately) and so if your site receives 10,000 visitors (all visiting one page only) that's 10,000 impressions for the header code and 10,000 impressions for the footer code (you can see this bit is wrong now, it's 10,000 impressions overall, but lets keep going anyway). That would describe scenario (I) right? In scenarios (II) we give every page of the site (or at least important pages) their own unique header and unique footer code and this means AdSense counts the impressions in a different way. So when a visitor hits page 3 it gets unique footer code and so gets 1 impression for that code. Another visitor visits page 6 and gets 1 impression for that unique footer code. Now assuming there's a filtering type function that as a site gets more traffic, the ads shown become cheaper, by arranging your site in this way AdSense counts individual page impressions separately, in effect say turning a 100 page website to be treated as 100 separate domains with one page each and so will never be hit with a 'penalty' for having a lot of impressions. Have I understood this correctly? Ignoring the assumption sites with a lot of traffic receive lower paid ads (I've not seen this), the whole idea is silly. Firstly server side includes are not seen by AdSense and so there's no way for AdSense to know if page 3 and page 6 ad unit code is identical. This would then lead to the conclusion for this to work that every ad unit needs something unique in the code, a different channel for example. Admittedly there's nothing stopping AdSense counting channels as separate entities and so not adding this traffic penalty thing, but lets think this through, why on earth would AdSense not just look at all impressions from a domain and if they do reduce the price of ads as traffic increases just use that variable to determine when to show the lower price ads? I'm sorry, it's a silly idea. Seams to me your clutching at straws to find away to turn poor performing sites into high profit sites. I have two sites with similar impressions a month, so far this month one has learnt over 3 times the other has. Some sites makes more than others because of multiple factors, how much advertisers are willing to pay, how relevant the ads are to the content, quality of your visitors, have your visitors had their needs met by your site (if so why click an ad) etc... Speaking of the belief as a site gets more traffic ad value decreases, have you even noticed that at the start of the AdSense day eCPM is far higher than at the end of the day? This has a lot to do with advertisers running out of funds early in the day bringing down the cost of ads to AdWords users. As a advertiser drops out the price per click can drop and so it looks like as more traffic pours into a site less we make. David Law
If it's BS how come I can get 1 impression for a new page when there's always three ad units on them? Since I use 3 ad units per page, if each ad unit resulted in 1 impression, my total impressions would always be a multiple of 3 and it isn't? This is true over all ways I track ad units. One last thing, since I put AdSense on every page of some sites, again with 3 ad units per page, if each unit resulted in 1 impression my total impressions per site would be around 3x the traffic reported in my servers logs and it isn't? Normally impressions are LESS than traffic reported by log software (after taking into account search engine spiders) since some traffic doesn't use javascript. So I'm very confident the quote from Google AdSense help pages is accurate. David Law