An 'AdSense Help'-ing hand

Since the AdSense Help Group launched, we noticed you've been having lots of interesting discussions about AdSense. We thought we'd address a couple questions that have come up fairly frequently in the Help Group.

My website tracking software is registering more impressions than my AdSense account -- why is there a discrepancy?

To provide more accurate information about ad performance, we count impressions only when the AdSense JavaScript is executed by a user's browser. Therefore, the impressions listed in your AdSense account may differ from statistics reported by third parties. For example, AdSense doesn't count impressions generated by:

Other spiders, robots, crawlers from other search engines

Browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled or don't support JavaScript

Browsers that don't support the iFrame tag

Programs that people may have written to grab website content

I pasted AdSense ad code for two ad units into my site -- why is only one ad unit appearing on my page?

Don't worry, this is normal ad behavior designed to automatically optimize your site's revenue potential. Although you can display up to 3 ad units per page, sometimes only the first ad unit contains ads. When highly targeted ads aren't available for all your ad units, we'll display the additional ad units as transparent boxes rather than showing ads that our system determines would not perform well. As our ad inventory changes, or if your page content changes, you may start seeing ads appear in all of your ad units.

In the meantime, you can set up your ad code so that an alternate ad will appear when this happens.

Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support