Confirmation of Adsense Theory

I always have wondered how Google Adsense reporting really works, and suspected that multiple machines gather data and report it back to a central location in batches. A recent website crash helped confirm that theory.

What happened is that APLawrence.com crashed today for 90 minutes. The last entry in the logs prior to the crash was 13/Oct/2009:14:14:18 (GMT) and the first after that was at 13/Oct/2009:15:45:23 - we were completely down during that interim.

And yet, checking Adsense reports during that time period showed an increasing number of page impressions. There's only one explanation for that: multiple machines are tracking and reporting in batches. That's hardly unexpected - I can't imagine how Google could do this any other way - but it is interesting to confirm it.

Keep that in mind when looking at Adsense reports - they aren't necessarily current and there may be more data to come even if your website is dead.

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