Here is some information that may help if you are concerned about the Adsense Reports not meeting your expectations.
"on days when you receive a small number of placement-targeted ad impressions (say, less than 10), no earnings may appear. This doesn't mean you're not accruing any earnings, but because placement-targeted ads are paid on a cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) basis, you may be earning less than $0.01 for each impression.When advertising on a CPM basis, an advertiser may pay as little as $0.50 for each 1000 impressions of an ad; with each impression worth $0.0005, you could receive up to 9 ad impressions for total revenue of $0.0045 without any clicks or earnings appearing in your report. Although revenue smaller than one cent is not displayed in your reports, rest assured that all your revenue will be added and included in the monthly totals on shown on your Payment History page."
source:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...
As far as I can interpret all this, there is always a deiffernce between:
1. real hard "internal" log files from your webserver (which you should also check with a good logfile analyzer
2. "external" statistical counters like Google Analytics (which must wait until the full page is loaded if it is placed at the bottom near and depends on javascript enabled by the endusers browser
3. Measuring "outgoing links" when a visitor leaves your site - if the measuring probe relies on javascript. (Or in the worst case interferes with the Adsense javascript code!!!)
4. The numbers "displayed" in the Adsene Reports
5. The numbers "paid out" (see explanation in the Google help article which I linked to above)
P.S. I had a time where I was very sceptical about 2. and 3. regarding performance of the website for the visitor.
If I place all those javascript tracking codes in the wrong place (f.e. inside a HTML table, where the browser does not display the whole table until all contents including the Analytics, statcounter, getclicky, etc... are fully loaded (from external servers with many hostnames and therefore many DNS queries involved).
So I had a time wheer i was skeptic about performance. I removed all javascript codes (like blog communities, addthis buttons etc...) and I tested my hosting provider for packet loss and availability.
With this in mind I said to myself: The performance for the enduser is the most important thing. Would you smile if you have to wait 8 seconds for a page to load, and then even be motivated to read the content or continue further and click a relevant ad? I said no fto myself
and do you know what I used instead of the external javascript counter?
Adsene Reports! ;-) Yes it was that simple. At the beginning it is amazing to follow every visitor and every click. I want maximum performance, visitors and pageimpressions to server my relevant content. And at the end of the (day) I mean month I looked at the earnings and they where twice as good as the month before! Now I use Analytics only every second month for some more insight, but the rest of the time I leave the visitors with optimized load times and get more clicks.
Join the discussion about this topic at my Google Forum thread
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=6c1...
