Clicks but no revenue (earnings)?

This question crops up quite frequently. Publishers says he or she see clicks in the report, but not income or revenue or earning earnings. Now there can be various reasons for this:

Public Service Advertisements

The clicks you see in your report may be clicks on Public Service Ads (PSA) or sometimes called community ads. These are ads for approved organizations such as charities. You will not be paid for these clicks if any of your visitors click on them. But PSA if displayed on your website can be identified for you will not see "Ads by Google" appearing with PSA. Such ads will be displayed when Google AdSense cannot find matching ads relevant to the content of your website from the pool of available ads, they will either display PSA, a blank or colored space or ads of your choice (see below)

When you Generate scripts for Google AdSense ads (click BACK button to get back to this page), you have the choice of allowing PSA (I do that for all my ads as my contribution to the community), choose alternative ads to be displayed or display blank or colors empty space.

Invalid clicks

Clicking on ads in your own website is considered invalid clicks (used to be called fraudulent clicks) and if identified, will not generate any earnings for you if you are lucky, and can get you banned practically for life if unlucky. Invalid clicks can also be identified by AdSense when there are repeated clicks from the same computer, etc. They made their definition very wide and you have no way of telling how they rule which clicks are valid and which are not. If they detect many invalid clicks, they may even suspend your account.

Clicks on CPM (Cost per 1000 Impressions) ads

There are 2 types of advertisements, CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions). Impressions are the number of times the ads are displayed. Advertisers do not pay anything if no one click on CPC ads displayed. You will only be paid if a visitor click on a CPC ad.

Advertisers pay whenever CPM ads are displayed irrespective of whether anyone click on the CPM ads or not. As long as the CPM ads are displayed on your website, you will earn something even if no one click on them. Now note, if someone click on your CPM ads, you will get some earnings, but these may be so low that they are less than 2 decimal points as it will be based on impression, not on click. Wo in your report the earning may be reported as $0.00 giving you the impression that you will be thinking that you earned nothing. But look at the column for eCPM (effective Cost per Impression). It should be non-zero. If you want to know how much you earned for those impressions, refer to Table to automatically calculate the earning from impressions (click BACK button to get back to this page).

So I hope this post gives you a good picture of what may be going on if you see clicks in your report, but in the column for earnings, it is reported as $0.00