The allowed sites feature is great. As someone who’s been through the process of having his Adsense account disabled due to ads appearing on sites I don’t control (basically vandalism on the part of another webmaster) it’s great to be able to sleep at night in the knowledge my publisher ID isn’t being served on any pages that could get my account banned.
However, having just switched to using Analytics, I had a quick look at it this morning, then a look at Adsense. Adsense is recording more than double the number of page impressions that Analytics is. Luckily, within your Adsense account there’s a list of the sites that are attempting to display your ADs. Guess what? They are all Google pages, so this is people viewing my page in Google’s cache rather than actually visiting my site.
The answer to this is simple – add google.com to your allowed sites list. It also make sense to add your “local” Google, so I added all the English language Googles I could think of.
