Can anyone make sense of this Adsense - Analytics disparity?

**Clinton** · May 20th, 2010, 09:10 AM

The way the site I'm looking at right now is setup is that each page has one channel in Adsense. So the number of page impressions in Adsense for each channel should be exactly the same number of impressions shown in Google Analytics for that page.

However, the Adsense page impressions show up as between 50% and 1000% more than the equivalent Google Analytics stats.

I've heard Adsense webmasters moan that the opposite is often the case and that Google is "cheating them" by fiddling their Adsense earnings. I don't believe Google can be bothered to do that but I do see frequent complaints that the Adsense stats are under-reporting.

What could be the reason for the Adsense over-reporting in this case? Or is it that it's Analytics that's under-reporting? When buying a site do you compare Adsense PIs with those from GA? And how do you interpret the traffic results if these two trackers show substantially different results?

How do GA and Adsense stats compare on your own sites? Are they usually in synch?

**hooperman** · May 20th, 2010, 09:19 AM

Some dumb questions: Are you sure you're not looking at unit impressions instead of page impressions? Are you sure that that unit appears only on that one page?

Could you integrate Adsense and Analytics to get a better view of what's going on?

**JJMcClure** · May 20th, 2010, 09:21 AM

Might be one of these reasons -Why do my statistics differ between AdSense and Analytics?

**Andy** · May 20th, 2010, 09:40 AM

Great page Rich,

To put it simply there's three kinds of lies: white lies, damn lies and statistics.

Andy

**Clinton** · May 20th, 2010, 09:43 AM

hooperman, good point. I went back and checked. Yes, it's in my default position of "show data by page".

Adsense and GA are integrated - that's where I'm getting my figures from. I'm comparing Adsense's page "impressions" with the Analytics Content > Traffic Sources > Top Landing Pages.

Thanks for the link, JJMcClure. It appears the disparity could be caused by
- ad blockers blocking Adsense
- iframe blockers blocking Adsense

Those wouldn't apply in this case as Adsense is higher, not lower.

The only possible reason I could see from the list on that page is this (though I don't believe it completely accounts for the difference):

Some browsers give users the option to disable images that are requested from domains other than the current page. If visitors to your site have disabled such images, it will stop the data from being sent to Google Analytics, which in turn prevents the corresponding AdSense information from appearing in your Analytics reports.