I hope this is the right place for this. I only recently began using adsense on my sites and have noticed that every once in a while I will get 1 or 2 cents credited to a channel but no clicks noted for that channel. Are these folks paying for impressions, or what is going on? Many thanks in advance for your help.
Yes, I just emailed google, they said it's CPM ads Hi, Thanks for your note. It is possible that you can generate revenue, without any clicks in your account, because cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) ads may be appearing on your site. I'll be happy to explain in more detail below. The ads you display on your sites are a combination of cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) ads and cost-per-click (CPC) ads. When CPM ads appear on your site, you might notice that your reports show earnings and an eCPM that's greater than zero, even with no associated clicks. This is because CPM ads pay for impressions, rather than clicks. Your Reports Overview page shows the combined impressions and earnings for CPM and CPC ads. To view separate reports for the site-targeted CPM ads, visit your 'Advanced Reports' page. Choose AdSense for content as the product and select to show data by 'Individual Ad Unit' - you'll see a checkbox titled 'Show data by targeting type - contextual or site.' Check this box, then generate a report for the date range of your choice. Also, you may sometimes notice that your effective CPM (eCPM) is greater than zero even though you've received no clicks. This is because advertisers displaying ads through AdSense may pay on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) basis. When advertising on a CPM basis, an advertiser may pay as little as $0.50 for each 1000 impressions of an ad; with each impression worth $0.0005, you could receive up to 9 ad impressions for total revenue of $0.0045 without any clicks or earnings appearing in your report. Although revenue smaller than one cent is not displayed in your reports, please be assured that all your revenue will be added and included in the monthly totals on shown on your Payment History page. I hope you found this information helpful. For additional questions, I'd encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help). Sincerely, Karen The Google AdSense Team
Can I say that if you see your site getting CPM ads, it is time to find alternative way to make money, such as affiliate program.
Daniel, I don't think so, but this is definitely a warning that your Ads may not be related to your content and/or not catching the eyes of your visitors. best regards, Tony Sticks.