I don't see any relationship between what you spend on advertising on other sites and the revenue you receive from other sites advertising on your site.

Perhaps the advertising carried on your site has a lower value (CPC) than that which you are required to pay in order to advertise your site?

Matt

Hmm... well, I'm looking more closely at my AdSense stats. The amount I'm earning per click seems reasonable. But their stats of page impressions seem quite off!

Case in post - there's one section of my site that I assigned a new channel. According to AdSense, there was 27 impressions over the past 7 days for that channel. But according to my log stats (Webalizer), there have been over 700 page hits in that section (and thus that ad channel) in just the last 5 days. I have the Google Ad in an include and so its not possible that the ad channel data is wrong on some pages...if there was anything wrong with that, I would have 0 impressions, not 27.

So perhaps this is where the issue lies ... I wonder if its possible some of my impressions/hits just aren't being tracked somehow? Wierd.

AdSense does not work if visitor has javascript disabled in their browser. That may be an explanation of why your log shows more then adsense.

According to AdSense, there was 27 impressions over the past 7 days for that channel.

Impressions are only counted IF there is a change in the ads displayed.

If there is not enough inventory of ads for your subject the ad will not change therefore your impressions will not increase.

Also don't forget spiders and bots increasing your log views.

If your stats report is showing 25X more impressions than AdSense does, then there is a serious disconnect somewhere. That's far too large to be due to ad blockers or disabled Javascript. Spider activity might well be the answer.

In any case, I have always found Google's reporting to be extremely accurate, so IMO you should be looking at what exactly Webalizer is measuring and what exactly Google is measuring. It's probably 2 substantially different things.

Hits and visits are two different things.
I use Webalizer as well and visits are always just a small fraction of the hit count.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 5:28 pm (utc) on Nov. 5, 2006]

cabbagehead, sign up for a Google analytics account to track your ROI. It's integrated with AdWords.

can you say what your ctr is approximately

I'm certain AdWords and AdSense talk to each other. Perhaps not ideal in terms of an arbitrage strategy.

AdWords is the old standby but alternate traffic sources do exist.