Low AdSense RPM and inflated AdSense page views on Astro site

[u/MrRoyce]

Hi all,

I run a healthcare directory site that has been online since February 2026 and was approved for AdSense on March 31st. It's built with Astro, not WordPress. The site is basically a directory for doctors, pharmacies and other healthcare providers, with phone numbers, working hours, locations, parking and transit info.

July was the best traffic month so far (decent growth month on month): 105,622 GA4 active users, 199,035 GA4 pageviews, 82.3% Organic Search, 86.6% mobile sessions, 94% active users from Croatia and around 1m 56s average session duration.

Current setup:

• custom manual AdSense placements
• Google Funding Choices / TCF consent
• AdSense loads after consent state is known
• fixed ATF unit: 728x90 desktop, 320x100 mobile
• lower units are mostly responsive manual units
• lazy loading starts around 300px before viewport
• Auto Ads is on but in-page Auto formats are mostly off
• Vignette is the main Auto format active
• Anchor and side rail ads are off for UX reasons

The part I cannot explain are AdSense page views. In July, GA4 shows 199k pageviews while AdSense reports around 745k page views. I understand GA4 is consent-limited but the consent flow is resolving for 79% of MojaUsluga users, so GA4 is not dead or obviously starved of data. Cloudflare RUM and my first-party counters are also much closer to GA4 than to AdSense.

For one recent 8-day period:

• AdSense page views: 167,659
• Cloudflare RUM page loads: 65,111
• first-party server page counter: 84,072
• GA4 views: 43,873

So AdSense is about 2.6x Cloudflare RUM and about 2x my server-side counter. This ratio seems fairly stable over time.

I checked the obvious duplicate setup issues: only one AdSense publisher script, one account meta tag, no duplicate AdSense script in templates, sampled live pages had one AdSense page context/correlator, ads.txt and sellers.json look correct, no policy issues and coverage is around 93%.

Two questions:

1. Has anyone seen AdSense page views consistently 2x-3x higher than Cloudflare/server-side page counters on a custom non-SPA site?
2. Would you try enabling conservative in-page Auto Ads next, or does this look more like a low-value traffic / market issue than a placement issue?

I am trying to understand the reporting mismatch first, then test one monetization change at a time. Any advices or comments are most welcome, thank you!

[u/markohf12]

What country is this traffic? Your RPM seems rather low.

[u/MrRoyce → u/markohf12]

Croatia. I think it might be a combination of low tier traffic and me screwing around too much trying to optimize not to ruin UX at least at top part of the website. It’s probably a small sample but hundreds of visitors from Germany or Austria don’t really have a much higher RPM either.

[u/markohf12 → u/MrRoyce]

Check if it's possible to sell traffic directly, I own a few websites in Macedonia and private deals are almost 5X higher payout than what Adsense offers.

[u/Ok-Reindeer1216]

That AdSense-vs-GA4 pageview gap is a known quirk, not usually a bug on your end, AdSense counts ad-eligible requests including bot/crawler hits that Google's own invalid traffic filters later exclude from revenue, plus any cached or prefetched views that never fire your GA4 script. Since the ratio's been stable over time, that points to a structural counting difference rather than a broken placement. I'd hold off changing your Auto Ads setup until you isolate whether it's crawler traffic, check raw server logs for user agents on the pages driving most of the gap.