Statistics

A famous aphorism says, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” meaning you can support any statement and sound authoritative, so long as you quote statistics. Fortunately, the statistics shown in an AdSense Ad Performance report are simple enough that they are hard to misinterpret, but you should be clear about the terminology used.

Each report will show you daily statistics (each of these is a column in the AdSense report, as shown in Figure 9-15):

Impressions

An ad impression is recorded each time an AdSense ad unit is displayed. A page impression is recorded each time a web page containing an AdSense ad unit is displayed. A single display of a web page containing three ad units would produce one page impression and three ad impressions.

Clicks

A visitor’s click on an ad on a publisher’s page. Public service ad clicks are not included in this statistic.

Note

Google reserves the right to audit clicks and retroactively remove clicks that it deems invalid—for example, if Google finds you have been clicking ads on your own pages. These clicks will show up in the report that is displayed, even though you won’t make any money from them.

CTR

CTR (click-through rate) is the number of clicks an ad unit receives divided by the number of times the ad unit is displayed (ad unit impressions).

eCPM

Effective CPM (eCPM; cost per thousand impressions) is calculated by dividing the total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $100 from 20,000 impressions, the eCPM would equal $100/20, or $5. The point of this metric is to provide a way to compare AdSense’s CPC revenue with the money you might make from other forms of advertising, such as affiliate advertising (see Chapter 5) or CPM (see Chapter 6).

Your earnings

This column shows your earnings, either in aggregate or for selected channels. These are not final numbers and may be subject to adjustments. (See Your Earnings for information about final earnings numbers.)

Figure 9-15. You should monitor your earnings for trends and inconsistencies (such as the relatively poor result shown on Thursday in this figure)

The Point of eCPM

eCPM is related to CTR—the higher the CTR, the better the eCPM comparison. Google includes this metric as a way to compare apples to apples—AdSense CPC with conventional CPM advertising—and stacks the deck slightly in its own favor while doing so. (I would, too, if I had a program that delivers as well as AdSense.)

The normal cost of CPM advertising is in the $3 to $4 ballpark. If you have a reasonable CTR (anything better than about 1.5 percent), your eCPM will demonstrate that you are doing significantly better than you would have with conventional CPM advertising.

Note

You can sort the report by one of these columns by clicking the column headers. For example, if you have a month’s worth of data displayed and want to see it with the day with most clicks displayed first, clicking on Clicks will accomplish this sort.