UPDATE: Please read the comments, Justin of Adgator has answered a lot of our questions and given some good news about the future!

We’ve been trying to work out the difference between a great day on AdGator and a terrible one to work out whether its worth our time at all, and stumbled across some peculiar stats.

Firstly, I still haven’t found anywhere on the site that actually says it doesn’t pay you for non-South African views or what defines what is a South African view but I’ve assumed that its true based on what IMod has said and that “ad impressions” seem to have no bearing what-so-ever on earnings.

So we’re comparing Febuary 2 and Febuary 4 because Feb 2 was a killer day and Feb 4 a terrible day. In order to determine the south african ad impressions I’ve included Google Analytics data about our visitors on those days (because Ad Gator doens’t tell you). I’m assuming their system for determining South African’s is as accurate (or should be) as whatever analytics uses (IP to Country is pretty easy and reliable, we’re not talking about cities).

Febuary 2
Analytics South Africa:    19 visitors     3.79 pages
Total South African page views: 72
Total ad impressions (adgator): 2050
Adgator earnings: R6.68

Febuary 4
Analytics South Africa:    22 visitors     1.27 pages
Total South African page views: 27.94
Total ad impressions (adgator): 2307
Adgator earnings: R0.45

The important information here (assuming it is south african only) is that we did a total of almost 28 views on Feb 4 compared with 72 views on Feb 2. Clearly, Feb 2 did more traffic but only about 2.5x more. Now if you compare the earnings you see the discrepancy – Feb 2 earned around 14.8 times more!

Anyone care to try and make sense of this? I know they don’t guarantee anything and I’m not expecting them to; but 2.5x more page views meaning 14.8x times more money has to mean there is something behind the scenes we aren’t seeing.

How long until we can get statistics on how many ads we actually showed? Why are these being hidden when they could even just be showed numerically? What use is ad impressions if it has no bearing on money earned? What’s really going on ?

From breaking the news some time ago on the Text Link Ads site design rip to being left in the dark I really don’t know how much work they are putting into this service which originally promised us thousands of rands a month after entering our page views into the calculator.

Popularity: 18% [?]