Inexplicable AdSense Impressions

It has been a long time since I’ve written in my AdSense journal. In fact, the last time I wrote was on December 26, when I turned off Themed Ad Units. Now that it has been about 2 weeks and 2 days since then, let’s take a look at the results.

Since the Themed Ad Units setting is univeral (across all websites), I’ll analyze my aggregate stats. Note: I’m sure Google supports this sort of thing: consider Google Analytics. I see pretty high numbers for the first part of December, with the main statistic — page CTR — that it is likely to affect being virtually constant the entire time. It drops a tenth of a percentage point for Dec. 14 to 16 (probably due to increased impressions), then picks up again. Actually, after Dec. 17, there is a drastic drop in impressions (it becomes about 52% of what it used to be). Then, on Jan. 1, it becomes about 15% of what it was. However, the increased CTR virtually makes up for it.
Google Community was down up until yesterday. I think it went down around Jan. 5, a week ago. It dropped from some 7,865 impressions on the 4th to 1,160 on the 6th. However, it has almost completely picked up since then, showing 7,585 for the 11th (yesterday), when it came back online. Just about 6 days’ revenue was lost, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 10. It has now picked up and looks normal again.

Invision Plus stats, on the other hand, have gone totally bonkers. And I can’t explain this… from 43k impressions on the 3rd to 1,038 impressions on the 4th, clicks did not drop accordingly. Instead, the clicks, CTR, and CPM have increased, seemingly to make up for the shortfall in impressions. Yet I’m sure impressions have not changed that much. So what warrants the change?! I think the AdSense stats are just being ridiculously inaccurate at the moment, at least for this URL channel. Custom channels show similar stats. The big change seemed to happen Jan 1. I might have to research this.

The verdict on Themed Ad Units? No significant change, unless that setting also somehow affects impressions. I’m going to have to rectify that before my next experiment: turning on image ads.