Clicksor affiliate reporting - Inaccurate or do I just not understand?

Ok, so I don't just do real estate - I actually have quite a lot of my own websites that I have owned for years and done affiliate marketing on. This provides me with a way to test search engine optimization techniques away from my client websites (None of my personally owned websites are hosted on (Or even hosted in the same state as) any of my REW clients so don't worry folks!

Anyways, I was looking at testing out the Clicksor "Publisher Webmaster Affiliate Program" - This is a program much like Google Adsense (A contextual ad service) which shows ads relevant to the content on the website. Their message states:

Clicksor offers webmasters the opportunity to earn more income by simply underlining a selection of clickable text (inline text links) or displaying targeted contextual ads (various sizes of banners) on their Web sites or blogs.

Cool sounds great, I am always up for more revenue! So lets check it out. So I follow their contextual ad instructions to a tee, setting up the ads in the header of the site, and ads start showing right away (Excellent I did it right for a change haha) - Anyways, I placed the code in the exact same include as I placed my Google Analytics code for this site, that way I can test out their tracking and make sure they are honest, and that their system works well - proper due diligence, just smart to verify things (Sorry clicksor, not that I don't trust you it's just business)

So anyways, ads continue to show on every page, all day and night, the whole time Google Analytics is tracking that same traffic that is viewing these ads (I think we get paid on both impressions AND clicks don't we?)

After a few full days of tracking I start looking at the traffic and I am getting a bit concerned, here is why:

I checked the traffic in Google analytics for July 1st and July 2nd, which produced a total of 101,672 visitors and 1,288,009 page views see screen shot below: (I know I know, pretty impressive huh?) Anyways, not here to brag about traffic:

So I look at the clicksor report (Also screen shot below) and the traffic numbers they are reporting are WAY under what Google analytics report  in fact they only report 65,279 impressions (I presume these are the same as page views, as an ad is served on every page view) for the same time period.

That is a difference of 1,222,730 impressions should I be concerned?

Perhaps I don't understand something about their system (At least I would hope this is the case) - I would hate to think that this ad service is grossly under reporting (And underpaying) it's publishers.

Has anyone else ever done a study on this or tracked their clicksor impressions VS their analytics to compare the reporting?

I am going to be doing some more digging in the documentation in the backend, and see if there is something I am missing regarding their reporting. One thing I did notice was that a lot of the time, I see ads for clicksor itself (Likely because they don't have enough inventory to support my traffic) - but should these ads not reflect in the impressions reporting as well? Do I not get paid to show clicksor ads? Not sure (And at this point clicksor I am not saying you are cheating, just explaining my thought and discovery process here)

I will post some more in this blog post, once I have dug a little deeper to find out exactly what is going on, and try to identify what I am missing here.

• Clicksor
• Google Analytics

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