3 months ago the total impressions of most of my banners were in the 1500-6000 range. Now most banners' total impressions are in the 24000-930000 range (twenty four thousand to nine hundred thirty thousand), with most of them being in the 60000-70000 range.

I used the daily email reports to check the statistics for correctness. FYI my Banner refuses to send more than 5 email reports, for unknown reasons. For a specific banner, the my banners screen reports 76025 total views. There were 5924 total views 3 months ago. The check through email reports revealed 66 views in the last week of July, 307 views in August, 545 in September, and 79465 in October. I should expect 86307 total views, but Banner reports only 76025. To add to the confusion, the high number in October is unexplainable: The daily emails reveal that only a handful of days seen many daily views in the middle of October, and the rest days were normal (an average of 10-20 views per day). The sequence is like this:

1 October: 25 views, 2 October: 22, 3 Oct: 7, 3 Oct (again, yes this means some days Banner sends two emails, I don't know why this happens!) 19, 4 Oct: 159 (problem of bad stats starts here). 5 Oct: 2215, 6 Oct: 4619, 7 Oct: 9993, 8 Oct: 12341, 9 Oct: 11885, 10 Oct: 10634, 10 Oct (same day again!): 23155, 11 Oct: 1906, 12 Oct: 1353, 13 Oct: 931, 14 Oct: 24 (problems stops here), 15 Oct: 12, et cetera.

Comparing with all other daily email reports I have it seems the average daily views are in the 10-20 range, so seeing reports of 23155 views in a single day is strange, and could only be explained by a sudden increase in website traffic. However this didn't happen, as evidenced by AWStats. There was no more traffic between 4 October and 14 October than before. This is also confirmed by Webalizer.

Therefore the statistics reported by Banner must be wrong, but the question is: Why? and How to fix it? Unfortunately I don't know, and I suspect it could be a bug. Under what situation could Banner report so strange statistics?

The site is Drupal 4.6.3 with PHP 5.0.3, and Apache 1.3.

Comments

dan_aka_jack’s picture

dan_aka_jack commented

Hmm... this problem sounds _really_ bad news for those of us who are charging advertisers by CPM.

Are there any plans to fix this problem?

wulff’s picture

wulff commented

If you are using the file cache, please try the latest cvs version of banner_file.php.

I'll try and run some tests to see if I can replicate this behavior.

paolability’s picture

paolability commented
Version: master » 4.6.x-1.x-dev

I've also seen inflated banner stats since starting work on a site in March.

On the site today, for example, according to access.log there were about 100 page views from a specific site section (by taxonomy term). Whilst a banner allocated only to that term has a page view count of over 3,500.

To test in real time, I did a tail -f on access.log to make sure that no one else was accessing the section and reloaded the web page. The # of the day's views of a banner allocated to that page went up by 26 with my one page view. To make matters worse, the password-protected dev site (which only a handful of people have access to) shows a day view figure of over 26,000 for the banner on the page.

I put some debug print statements in banner.module to try to find out where the page view updates were taking place but I couldn't find the db update code. I would have thought this was it but my print statement didn't trigger: db_query('UPDATE {banner} SET clicks = clicks + 1, day_clicks = day_clicks + 1, week_clicks = week_clicks + 1 WHERE id = %d', $id);

Using Drupal 4.6.?, Apache 1.3, PHP 5.1.4, MySQL 4.1.8

marcoBauli’s picture

marcoBauli commented

did anyone experienced this on 4.7? Is this fixed in cvs?

thank you

wulff’s picture

wulff commented

I haven't been able to reproduce this error on 4.7 with the latest cvs version.

paolability’s picture

paolability commented

Is the banner module for 4.6 now unsupported?

wulff’s picture

wulff commented

It is not completely unsupported, but it might receive a little less attention than the 4.7 branch and the effort to update the module to work with the current HEAD.

Which cache handler are you using (file/db)? What version is the cache handler file and the banner.module file (it is at the top of each file)?

paolability’s picture

paolability commented

Cache handler: file

Banner version: 1.50.2.1

What's the path/file name of the cache handler file? If it's banner_file.php, it's 1.13.2.1

wulff’s picture

wulff commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Marking as closed since the banner module has been abandoned.