As some of you who use MyBlogLog to track your blog metrics and statistics know, MyBlogLog monitors the number of Google AdSense clicks which are made on your blog.
And yes, Yahoo owns MyBlogLog, which gives the Yahoo Publisher Network the incredible chance to do some hardcore competitive intelligence on which blogs are sending the most clicks to Google AdSense advertisers, and projected AdSense click thru rates on these blogs (I don’t know if YPN does this or not, but if I were them I sure would).
Essentially, as a recruitment tactic, YPN could then pinpoint the blogs which are sending the most traffic and highest click thru percentages to Google advertisers, calculate a formula to show how much revenue that blog would make via YPN, and if the result of the equation is better monetization via YPN, those blogs could then be contacted and pitched.
Again, this is hypothetical, but it would be the perfect recruitment tool for YPN.
Now comes the question of accuracy in the MyBlogLog Google AdSense click reporting :
MyBlogLog’s stats and AdSense’s stats showed roughly the same number of impressions (give or take what you’d expect for people who block ads), but the stats for click-outs were totally different – by a factor of 10!
A little background information. This page recently appeared on the front page of BoingBoing, and as a result hit a load of new blogs. Traffic went up ten-fold over night. The following day, I was checking my AdSense stats and noticed that the spike produced no increase in ad clicks at all. The impressions were there, but clicks were reported at exactly the same level.
So I decided to check the MyBlogLog stats, and was surprised to see they reported an increase in clicks on Google Ads that matched the increase in impressions.
Jeremy Zawodny, who could be seen as an unoffcial Yahoo spokesperson, addresses the concerns on his blog (btw, Jeremy runs Google AdSense ads):
I’ve also seen this myself, but most days the numbers are pretty close to each other. They’re unlikely to ever be exactly the same, for a variety of reasons:
- Google does click fraud detection and removal. MyBlogLog doesn’t.
- MyBlogLog click tracking will timeout quickly (dropping the click) if there’s a network problem that slows it down.
- AdSense stats are usually based on a 24 hour day in the Pacific timezone, while MyBlogLog uses Eastern Time.
I’ve noticed the time difference on MyBlogLog too and actually like the fact that for once a tech tool is based on Eastern Time, but I have not compared the AdSense reporting to MyBlogLog. So, I’ll take a look at Saturday’s clicks, a day traffic boomed to about 22,000 readers from a high profile Digg post.
Google AdSense : 113 Clicks
MyBlogLog : 217 Clicks
MyBlogLog reported double the amount of clicks than Google AdSense. This makes me wonder, if the discrepancy is not a Google click fraud detection issue, how accurate is the rest of MyBlogLog’s outlink reporting? Or is Google not accurately reporting clicks?
