We just got a call from a new client, telling us that she was perplexed about the fact that the number of banner impressions on her Joomla website is unrealistic. She said that her Joomla website is getting about 10K visitors/month according to Google Analytics, but the number of impressions counted on her Joomla website are almost double that number.
Our immediate answer was: “yes – this is normal”, to which she replied: “How?”, and we replied: “Google Analytics only counts the net traffic to the website, so, it excludes all bots and spam traffic. Joomla doesn’t have the mechanism in place to discount that traffic, and so the traffic figures (from Joomla’s perspective) are highly inflated – hence the huge discrepancy.”
“Bummer!”, she said, “what are we going to do? We need to sell advertising to potential clients and we don’t have the correct number of impressions. Is there anything we can do now?”, she asked. We told her that for now she can communicate the numbers to the advertisers along with a disclaimer that these numbers may be highly inflated, but for the future, that she must use Google DoubleClick to manage her ads. The nice thing about Google DoubleClick is that it displays the exact number of impressions, and the exact number of clicks, and it automatically excludes all non-desirable traffic from the actual traffic numbers. The other nice thing about it is that it’s free (unless the website serves more than 90 million impressions/month – in which case publishers must pay money for Google).
So, does the above mean that the Joomla Banners extension is useless?
Yes – it does – we can’t think of a single reason which makes the Joomla Banners extension a practical ad management tool in today’s world wide web (in fact, two years ago, we have stated that this extension must be removed from the Joomla core). Maybe it was useful back in the early 2000s (back in the Mambo era), but, in 2016, there is not one reason for such an outdated extension to exist. Unless Joomla plans to integrate a webspam engine in its core, then the Joomla banners extension should no longer exist in the core.
If you are currently using the Joomla Banners extension and you just discovered that its statistics are way off and you want to implement Google DoubleClick, then we’re here to help. All you need to do is to contact us and we’ll take care of the whole thing swiftly, cleanly, and affordably!