Are impressions for HP ADS based on HP stats?

1. 88

   aa liteposted 12 years ago

   I would certainly hope not, given that the HP stats counter seems to be rather past its use-by date, and frequently gets stuck.  Even staff have told us in the past that we are better off using Google analytics.
   
   Whenever the stats get "stuck" they seem to have trouble catching up with the views we had in the meantime.  This is annoying, it is hardly a huge problem though.......unless the faulty stats are used to calculate our payouts.
   
   I would imagine that advertisers have their own way of counting impressions of their ads for which they pay.  That still leaves the problem of how the money is divided between different subdomains.
   
   It would be reassuring if somebody official could tell us that the problems with the HP views counter don't affect the money our hubs make.

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   1. 79

      WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Have you looked at the daily impressions in the earnings section? Maybe you could work it out from there. I'm too lazy. Good question though - however the fact that they take 40%, plus CTR varies and the main stats are on a rolling 24 hours instead of static... maybe hard to work out.

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      1. 88

         aa liteposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Yep, the best thing would be for a member of staff to come here and explain clearly how the number of impressions on our subdomains is calculated.
         
         Although possibly asking this on a Sunday is not the best strategy to get an answer.  I guess I'll just have to wait patiently till tomorrow.

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   2. 84

      Marina Lazarevicposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Technically, Hub Stats are completely separate from ad impression tracking for the Ad Program.
      
      The ad impressions are calculated by: 1) identifying the subdomain on the page, 2) identifying the ad locations on the page, 3)  determining which of those ad locations actually displayed an ad for a given impression, and 4) recording the data. It works pretty much the same way any ad network does it.
      
      If the Ad Program is performing poorly for you (as it has for others) then you should try switching to the AdSense only layout. I'm not sure if you've tried an AB test, but several Hubbers have done this and gotten mixed results! You can always turn the Ad Program on or off.

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      1. 88

         aa liteposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks Marina for answering the question.  That is all I wanted to know.  I did suspect that the ad impressions were independent of Hub Stats, but it is nice to have that confirmed.
         
         Actually I don't think the Ad program is performing poorly for me.  I suspect I would earn less from Adsense.  My main concern was that the Hub Stats are often on the blink (sometimes they don't update for days). 
         
         This is annoying because they are a nice way of tracking traffic. If they were also used to calculate ad impressions, that would be a lot more than annoying.

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         1. 84

            Marina Lazarevicposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Happy to hear that the Ad Program is performing well for you! I'm sorry about the recent bugginess with the Hub view stats. There were a couple major fixes recently that should make metrics tracking more robust. Of course, future bugs may come up, but we know how important this feature is to the community (and for good reason!) and will keep working to improve it.

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2. 0

   DigbyAdamsposted 12 years ago

   I've worried about this myself. Not only are statistics responsible for how much we make, but now traffic determines whether or not our Hubs remain featured. There is a lot to worry about here. There is very little transparency and accountability. There always seems to be "some bug" affecting the consistency.
   
   They conduct experiments but don't share the details - unless we catch them. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it's done to prevent us from understanding the impact of experiments ourselves. It makes it harder to game the system. Also to understand how things such as the Related Searches affect us.
   
   Yes I do use Google Analytics. But a lot of people apparently use these as well.

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3. 82

   HollieTposted 12 years ago

   Analytics annoys me. I know, I know I should be using it all the time but I like the nice, straightforward this is how many hits you've had in the last 24 hours and from where Hp counter. So I become really irritated when it's stuck.

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