Ok, I'm an idiot :p I knew this.... need to start getting some sleep and not staying up until 6am... I do apologize for the duh, question.

no worries, we are good (me included) to throw a day's work for 5 minutes of madness :)

Can it be used just as a header for a forums?

As fas as I know, it is not possible to inject code into the header, for example for rotating the header- or background image.

Does this provide the ability to only display an ad to a specific country, or is it not possible?

Short answer: no
Long answer: If you have pages which are shown only to certain countries, you can show also banners only for those pages. But it depends on your page settings, not the banners themselves.

How would I go about making pages only viewable to certain countries? Is it a IF conditional statement?

You would normally do this at the server side with GeoIP and/or browser User Agent/Language detection. Eventually you would split then the forum into language or country dependent subdomains which however refer to the same installation, for efficiency. And then you would address one or more categories which are normally hidden, respectively for the language dependent pages. It sounds difficult, but is pretty easy to achieve

good morning - I am wondering if anyone has noticed an issue with reporting from this modification back to Google ad-sense.

for example, I am showing nearly 4.2 Million impressions for my top banner in the system in the last 2 weeks; however when I go to Ad-sense to check the same banner code, shows only around 650k impressions.

I have no reason to doubt that the application is adding more impressions since I have placed a banner on one of pages that I only have access to and the system is correctly counting the number of impressions. Part of this might just be my lack of knowledge of the communication between my forum and google.

And I'm not complaining about the traffic, I am just seeking further understanding. If there is a past post about this - kindly link me to this.

Thank you in advance,
Scott

As discussed earlier in this thread, Google counts hits only approximately and hits above 1000 per hour are eventually ignored. Also, devices which do not handle Javascript, such as spiders, some tablets and text-only browsers are not counted by Google.