One potential cause of inconsistencies between page views and impressions in adsense

If you’ve recently noticed a sudden inconsistency between the amount of page views and impressions in your daily adsense report, it might have been caused by your legitimate attempt to optimize the loading speed of your website.

Ad Scripts impact your site’s performance

If you’re running adsense on your site and generate a LightHouse (via Inspect / Chrome Dev Tools) or Google Page Speed Insights report, you’ve probably noticed that multiple Google scripts are impacting the performance of your site.

One of the tips usually given to optimize the perform of a website is to delay the execution of JS Inline scripts. The screenshot below is from Cloudways Breeze Caching Plugin.

It sounds like a pretty reasonable idea, suggested by Google itself in its Lighthouse reports.

But this can generate major issues in the computing of page views, inadvertently putting your account at risk.

High impressions, low page views

Let’s say for instance that you’re running 3 ads per page and usually see 3 (ad) impressions reported for 1 page view.

After delaying the execution of JS inline scripts (which would include by default the google_ad scripts), you could experience a sudden drop in page views.

If on a typical day you’d have 3000 impressions for 1000 page views, you could end up with 3000 impressions for 100 page views or even less, the failure to record page views being caused by your optimization efforts.

Some other KPIs will then be affected. You will get a higher Page RPM (since you’ll generate more cash per page view) and a much higher Page CTR (since you’ll generate more clicks per reported page view).

This can be seen as a red flag by Google Adsense and you risk having your account banned by being falsely accused of inflating your numbers, even if this wasn’t your intention.

So I would strongly advise you not to defer any adsense scripts, even if they impact your performance. The traditional JS minification, which helps improve loading speed, won’t cause the discrepancies triggered by delaying the inline scripts.

You can also activate lazy loading on your ad placements if you’re using a management solution like Advanced Ads Pro.