The Weirdness That Is Adsense

I enjoy exploring the mazes of Google Adsense’s labyrinthine reports and policies. Adsense has been phasing in a new reporting system, which provides a lot more information than the older system did—or at least, it provides it more accessibly. It’s full of curiosities.

Every now and again, you’ll see things in it that are truly mysterious.

One of the things they can do now is to identify the type of computer that was used to access a page. If you select “Performance Reports” and then click on “Platforms,” Google can actually tell you how many views of your site were made by people with desktops, mobile devices, etc. This amazes me (also creeps me out a bit: who needs Google spying on you in quite that much detail?).

Over the past week, for example, FaM readers viewed 563 of Funny’s pages with “high-end mobile devices.” Some of them apparently clicked on ads, since they generated a couple of bucks this week. The first time I discovered this Adsense Reports blandishment, a few people had been accessing the site through their mobile gadgets, but none of them were rising to any advertiser’s bait. Now, though, apparently some of them are biting.

Meanwhile, 5,005 pages were viewed from desktops. Unclear whether a “high-end mobile device” can be a laptop, or whether “desktop” = a big clunker on your desk or something like a MacBook, which today has more power and speed than my immobile iMac.

Equally unclear what is meant by “unmatched ad requests,” a line that appears on the “Platform” page. Whatever it is, it can’t be very significant: it always registers “0.”

Adsense kindly includes a sort of glossary with its reports page—it’s really an agglomeration of FAQs, I think. Look up “unmatched ad request” and you get the answer to some customer’s question about why this item appears in his reports:

An ad request is counted each time your site requests an ad to be served, even if no ad is returned. Unless your coverage is 100%, you will have more ad requests than matched requests (ads that are returned and displayed on your site), resulting in some unmatched requests.

Some reports have columns that are meaningful only for matched requests. For example, the Targeting type report shows how ads displayed on your site have been targeted. When an ad request is unmatched, there are no ads to consider, so the request has no targeting type. This is why unmatched requests appear in a separate row.

Uhm…yeah. Doesn’t that just clear everything up for you?

Oh well.

Moving on, the Biggest Mystery of Adsense—at least for my feeble little brain—is why some days and some weeks vast lucre (oh, say, $1.95 a day!) comes pouring in, and at other times pay is in pennies. The past two or three weeks, FaM has been cranking more pennies than usual (??? in the dead of summer when readers should be vacationing at the beach?????). But last month it didn’t earn enough to get Adsense off its duff to send a payment. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing (if I’m doing anything) to cause Adsense revenues to increase in some weeks and flatten out in others.

It does seem as though spikes in revenues may increase when you discuss certain topics. For example, the current increase seems to have occurred around the time I was holding forth about credit cards. A bunch of ads for banks, credit cards, loan sharks, and the like came up (at least, they did on my computer—apparently these things are tailored according to what Google can see of your browsing habits as it spies on you). Maybe ads from well-heeled institutions pay better…i.e., maybe Google charges ING more than it charges some local air-conditioning or pool company and then passes a few pennies of the profit along to the site publisher???

LOL! That would explain why some bloggers create whole sites devoted to nothing but discussing credit cards. 😀 Boooooring, but profitable.

Adsense has performed moderately well over the past week. Not well enough to retire to the Côte d’Azur, by any means, but well enough that if I could be certain it would behave this way all the time, the S-corporation that receives the vast lucre could afford to buy me a cell phone.

{sigh} But I’m afraid it’s just like adjunct teaching: catch as catch can.