Adsense: keeping webpage URL private, changing referrer

Question

If I show an Adsense ad unit on a webpage, does the page URL get passed to the advertiser and/or Google? Are they told every page that shows their ad or that someone clicks from? Is there a way to change it / make it a more generic URL?

I will be showing ads on both private and public pages. (Imagine content like a story where you can choose to keep it private or share it.) The private pages have a privacy setting similar to that of Google Docs where anyone with the link has access. Obviously, I can't share the links.

Can I change the referrer, make it a generic one that points to my website main page? If not, any ideas?

Answer 1

If I show an Adsense ad unit on a webpage, does the page URL get passed to the advertiser and/or Google?

Yes

Are they told every page that shows their ad or that someone clicks from?

Yes and no, Google won't report individual URLs which are shown less than a certain number of times (Google doesn't specify this number)

Is there a way to change it / make it a more generic URL? Can I change the referrer, make it a generic one that points to my website main page? If not, any ideas?

Not in the report provided by the AdSense API, Google will report the URL its ads are shown on, but you can do it via your script.

Here's from the official documentation:

URL of the page upon which the ad was served. This is a complete URL including scheme and query parameters. Note that the URL that appears in this dimension may be a canonicalized version of the one that was used in the original request, and so may not exactly match the URL that a user might have seen. Note that there are also some caveats to be aware of when using this dimension. For more information, see Page URL breakdown.