well not really lost, just lost track of it. I have dozens of sites with adsense on them, i'm pretty damned sure i've got them all listed in my channels, but i've obvisouly missed one because i'm getting impressions/clicks that aren't accounted for by one of the sites in my channels. now i've either completely forgotten about a site and it's earning me revenue, or i've mistakenly placed my adsense code on either one of my family members sites or a clients site (unlikely, not many clients have asked for adsense). If i contact adsense would they be able to tell me which site i have missed? would they frown upon me asking? thanks for any input
This is often reported in cases where a content theif steals an entire site and mirrors it. Of course it is stupid for them to forget to remove adsense, but sometimes that does happen. I belive this can also happen if you get a pay-per-impression ad rather than a PPC one. I think these don't show in regular channels, but only in URL channels? Can anyone confirm that?
If you have text on the site that is your "signature" or some sort of unique content that you are certain would be on one of your sites. Such as: site created by the guy who loses his URLs ;P You can do a search in google for that exact text using quotations marks around the text. (google search:"site created by the guy who loses his URLs") This might help you find the site.
hmm, hadn't thought about stolen content, i have a large tutorial site and have had my fair share of content stealing, they'd have to be really stupid to leave my adsense in though hehe. i'll have a crack at searching for some unique tutorials see if they come up, but otherwise all my sites are designed so that they aren't related to each other in anyway, no interlinking, "site designed by.." etc
Are you using URL channels? If so here is one possible explanation. If you use "www.my-site.com" as the url channel, and someone surfs to "my-site.com" (no 'www'), then those hits won't be counted by the URL channel.
Make sure to add the site's URL to the channel tracking. I had the similar problem previously too. Once I've done it, it is showing up now.
i saw this last night, so added my main sites to new channels without www. and sure enough www. and non www. has diferent stats today and different clicks, so it seems this would account for my missing hits. Thankyou is this a bug in the reporting that adsense is aware of or is it done on purpose?
I don't think it's really a bug. It allows you to report on different subdomains (e.g. cars.example.com vs. boats.example.com). www.example.com and example.com could point to to different pages, so they need to be able to be reported on separately.
I had a problem where I had either deleted a channel or mangled it in my ad code so my channel reports didn't match my overall reports. I had a maddening time with Google support - they were very unhelpful. It would be very easy for them to tell you if you had an incorrect channel, but they simply don't. It would also be trivial for them to automatically (without channels) break down your reporting by domain source, but again, they don't. One of the things that surprised me was that support seemed to assume that I'd be using static pages - in fact, I generate ad code on the fly and none of it is hard coded to the page (I do this to get ad rotation, split between Adsense and Yahoo and to vary ad type, left-right placement etc.). That makes me think that either the great majority of Adsense advertisers are extremely unsophisticated or that Google has no clue about its advertiser base.. Anyway: Adsense reporting is very weak. I wish they'd do better.