Click Tracking does not Accurately Reflect Google's numbers [#84458]

Hello!

i am running the latest adsense module along with Drupal 4.7.3 on two separate site. I have noticed that every day, the number of clicks shown by adsense, and the number of clicks reported by the adsense module are out of tune with each other. For instance, adsense is currently reporting 14 clicks for the day for one of my sites, while the adsense module is showing only 12. The numbers are similar on the other site,

Just thought I would make a note of this here.

Comments

Comment #1

kbahey commented 16 September 2006 at 04:30

Someone told me that they see double what Google says on one site.

In my case, I ran a variance analysis, using a spreadsheet, on two sites.

The variance was -7% on one site and +5% on the other. The period analysed was the first 14 days of September 2006.

Comment #2

Timotheos commented 16 September 2006 at 12:54

I posted this at http://drupal.org/node/28015 when we first put in this feature.

The clicks logged and what is shown by Google is not 100% inline. The reasons are numerous. Here's a few of them:

* The javascript doesn't work in Firefox. I'm not sure about Opera. I'm no good at javascript so if anybody has something better I'd love to see it.
* Google throws out what it sees as invalid clicks.
* I've found it takes Google 15 to 20 minutes before recording the click.

Khalid, you may want to put something like this in the readme text since this question may come up periodically.

Comment #3

Timotheos commented 16 September 2006 at 13:33

I forgot that another big one is if you're using AdLinks. The click on the link is recorded but any subsequent click on links is not recorded (since it's not actually on your site anymore).

Comment #4

brianV commented 16 September 2006 at 17:35

kbahey - that is about the variance I have been experiencing more or less.

Timotheos - I was not aware that the issue was caused by people clicking the ads in firefox. That makes sense then, because the variance roughly matches the ratio of IE users to Firefox users on the sites in question.

Are their plans for the Firefox-compatible JS code? I would offer to take a look at it, but I doubt I am any more adept with JS than you would be.

Comment #5

kbahey commented 16 September 2006 at 18:12

I updated the help on the admin/settings/adsense page to reflect these limitations.

Anyone who can contribute better javascript code, please do so. Or better yet, integrate http://www.adlogger.org/ with the adsense module for all of us.