Troubleshooting tips part III: Performance reports & earnings

Once ads are displaying fine on your pages, your next concern may be your earnings. To make sure all your impressions and clicks are recorded correctly, check out the following notes and tips.

First, be aware that your AdSense reports are updated every 15 to 30 minutes, but can sometimes take up to 24 hours to update. So at times, if you don't see the numbers you expect in your reports, be sure to check again later once your reports have been updated.

• Do you use the Allowed Sites feature? Allowed sites are websites or URLs on which AdSense publishers allow or wish to have their Google ads displayed. If you use the allowed sites feature in your AdSense account, be sure to add all the websites you're displaying ads on, to the list of allowed sites. If you forget to add a sites where you're displaying ads, then impressions and clicks on the sites will be shown in your reports, but advertisers won't be charged and the clicks won't earn any revenue.

• Do you have channels set up to track your clicks and impressions?
  
  • If your channel reports show more data than your aggregate reports, it might be the case that your domains or ad units are being tracked simultaneously on multiple URL or custom channels. If that's the case, then to see your complete, accurate statistics, visit your Advanced Reports page. When you select the Aggregate Data radio button and click Display Report, you'll see all clicks, page impressions, and earnings from your account with no duplication of data.
    
    
  • Alternatively, you may see that your aggregate reports show more data than your channel reports, even if all your pages are tracked with channels. This can occur sometimes when your page is displayed within a frame; in this case data won't appear in your channel reports but will display in your aggregate reports.

Channel data can be a bit tricky, so make sure to pick distinctive names to differentiate between URL and custom channels -- that way, you'll know exactly what data you're viewing. We also recommend checking out our optimization tips for channels to help you determine which ad units and placements are performing well, and how you can use this information to earn more revenue.

• If you have ad placements, have you named them accurately? Once you create channels for your ad units or domains, you can turn your custom channels into ad placements that advertisers can specifically target their ads to, using placement targeting. When entering a description for your channels to appear as ad placements, be sure to enter something informative and accurate to represent your site well.

Also, we advise you to be careful when renaming the ad placement as you will lose existing advertiser bids.

Next week, we'll look at publisher controls and how to filter certain ads from appearing on your site.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team