AdSense page impressions vs real number of page views by unique visitors. Learn what to do if Google shows less page impressions than you actually have

The recent annual traffic statistic caused me to have a look at the real traffic vs the Google AdSense recognized traffic. Lost pageviews means lost advertising revenue! In today's tough global market and the increasing need for cost efficiency it is critical to have as little "lost" advertising inventory as possible. Every unaccounted page view is a potential loss in revenue and thus makes your life harder. Invalid traffic may be valid in general but invalid by Google criteria. My own statistics are as accurate as possible and exclude all known machine created hits and non-human page requests by various technical means.

Millions of sites live entirely or mostly from advertising revenue to offer free services to Millions of annual site visitors or site users. The Cyberspace Ashram's stats show:

• 9'649'126 total AdSense page impressions in 2009
• vs
• 62'948'424 actual page views in 2009 according to my own detailed and accurate server access_log statistics

I do have a few pages that have no advertisement at all and never will have. Then I have a few pages unfit for ads - such as frameset pages. However all this considered, we see a huge difference between actual traffic and Google AdSense page impressions.

That is a known fact and if the real traffic is large enough - such as in my case, then it may be time for a remedy.

How to rescue lost traffic and convert uncounted page impressions into advertising revenue ?

With my new multiple server setup with one serveer specially dedicated to database, the obvious solution would be and most likely will be to install OpenX and add more non-Google advertisers. The best choice surely might be to first serve Google AdSense ads for the first page visited, then serve non-Google ads for follow up pages visited by the same unique visitor.

Google AdSense in most cases, specially multilingual sites with a full global coverage may bring the best overall revenue. However the lost traffic may be and should be recovered and used for anything useful. Even free ads for friends, community projects, social welfare, charity. self-advertisement for important chapters or promoting for free a small family business needing some additional support is still better than just loosing and wasting ten thousands of page impressions!

If you find yourself in a similar situation, you also may consider to use your own ad-server OpenX or any other to use some of the lost Google page impressions for another purpose.

Love and Bliss

hans