My server log stats show for example 1200 page views in a day, but my google adsense page impressions show say 700 views a day, I have ads on nearly every page, I would have expected a closer match - anyone else have anything similar?

Bots, people who disable Javascript, and anti-intrusion software such as Norton Internet Security can explain the discrepancy.

You're not the only one who has noticed this, though. The best thing you can do is to compile your raw logs using a stats analyzer such as AWStats. It won't tell you the last two, but it will likely reveal the first one.

According to Awstats, the number of visitors who have javascript disabled, or a browser that doesn't support it, is less than 2 %. I don't know how that compares against other sites?

If you take a step back, you've got an html document with some other files embedded. There's a css, some images, some javascript, and possibly other goodies. Your browser downloads the html, parses it, and starts making requests for the other files ( css, jpegs ) and executing the java script ... which in the case of Adsense, is requesting data from Google's server to display on your pages. People can skip some of the requests, even all of them, and just display your bare html. Browsers are built on the idea they need to get everything referenced by the page to render it properly.

On that note, there are brower plug-ins that disable ad scripts, block certain images, and so on. Since your Adsense report doesn't have access to your server logs, it doesn't actually know how many times your pages were served, only how many times the script was executed. So the numbers should tie in theory, but they're actually measuring different things.

Thanks - that explains a lot, I do use awstats (thats where my figures come from) as well as webalizer, but yeah, ad blockers, JS blockers would explain a large difference, thanks again - talkuptation coming your way

What browser do you use? FireFox gives you some interesting control over exactly what JS to allow and what not to. It isn't very featured ( you can block code's right to disable the right mouse click, resize your browser, and a few others ), and I don't think today's version would let you block ads but run mouseover code ... but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's coming.

I'm guessing there's no way to run adsense without javascript? They don't have an option that uses CGI at their end, or something like that?

i use FF, but log stats show 90% of traffic is IE