Yahoo Publisher Network clicks tracked, and ....

It's been a busy few days here. We're now tracking Yahoo Publisher Network ad clicks in addition to Google Adsense clicks. We're rushing a bit both because our users have been requesting this feature forevah, plus I'm a panelist this evening at Dave and Jeff's SDForum Search SIG covering Search Analytics.

Three things to note:

• We're going to add other ad networks as we can, including MSN, AdBrite, BlogAds, et al. Please let us know what other ad networks are important to you in the comments to this post.
• The system is far from perfect at this early stage. We will be testing the numerical precision of the system for a few weeks and will keep everyone apprised of news. The variation for the important parameters is already <10% but we want to know exactly what's going on.
• It is critical to note that we are counting a very different number than is reported to AdSense publishers by Google. Google (and we assume Yahoo), using the method they find best, reports to publishers how many valid clicks were made on their ads, i.e. how many clicks the publisher is getting paid for. We are simply reporting the total number of clicks made on the ads without regard to the clicks' validity as we have no way to determine what is a valid click versus an invalid click. That's why our count of clicks to googlesyndication.com will be somewhat higher than what Google reports.