General Category ads shown percentages don't add up

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General Category ads shown percentages don't add up

AndyA

4:17 pm on May 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

I've been disappointed in AdSense performance, and I've been paying close attention to the third party ad networks as well as attempting to fine tune the various general categories of ads that appear on my site.

I'm confused as to why the percentages don't add up when digging deeper within a general category. For instance, if you take Category A, which shows 5% of ad impressions, yet only 0.5% of income, that's an area to investigate. When you click on Category A, it may have 2 or 3 more specific categories listed within, but none of the ad impression percentages even come close to the 5% reported, nor does the percentage of income generated match what was reported in the overall category.

Is there a major delay in reporting this information, or do I just not understand what I'm looking at?

dk82

9:06 pm on May 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

Not all ads are assigned to categories at the same level. Using your example, if Category A has 5% of ad impressions and subcategories Category A1 and Category A2 each have 1%, that means 3% are assigned to parent Category A.

AndyA

1:44 pm on May 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

So that means the only way to get rid of the non-performing ads is to block the entire top category? Which would include the sub-categories that may be performing well?

I thought that the sub-categories would total up to 100% of the top category. If that isn't the case, then there's really no way to block the non-performing ads without also blocking the ads in sub-categories that are performing well.

I wish I'd just left things alone, but I thought with changes in traffic over time, it was wise to unblock some categories to see if they might perform better than they had in the past.

Thanks for the response, dk82.

dk82

1:33 am on May 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

I believe that's correct, as there's no way to allow a subcategory once the parent category is blocked. Depending the category you may achieve similar results by simply blocking all of the other subcategories.