In case your ads are not being evenly displayed

despite having turned off "Automatically optimize ad serving for my ads"

[inasisi]

I had turned off "Automatically optimize ad serving for my ads" so that I could test the efficacy of my different landing pages. Despite this, G would not evenly display my ads. One Ad would display 95% of the time, while the remaining 4 ads in that adgroup would display some 0% to 1% each. What was worse that the ad showing 95% of the time was not even the one with the highest CTR. This was happening in a number of my adgroups.

I complained about this to G and they came back saying that their tech folks are working on resolving this issue but a quick fix for this would be to turn on the optimizer and then turn it off immediately. That seems to have done the trick.

So if you are facing the same problem .....

[eWhisper]

Just to make sure, are you looking at a time frame in which the optimizer was turned off the entire time?

[inasisi]

Oh yes. I was looking at Today's data while I had turned off the Optimizer more than 2 weeks ago.

[Robsp]

Yep it is a bug and I send a detailed report last week. Turning it on and off helps and checking if this happens in your campaigns makes sense. It happens to the majority of our accounts over time...

Hope they find this one soon as this does not help our optimization efforts (it does help G with more $ :))

[inasisi]

It is actually worse. Everytime I add a new ad, the programs go for a spin and the ads don't get displayed evenly. Then I have to turn on the Ad Optimizer and then turn it off and then the Ads get displayed evenly. I have been noticing it over the last 3-4 days.

This definitely needs to be corrected, as it tends to be a pain for those of us who want to test the landing pages. AWA can you please add this as a bug to your weekly report?

[AdWordsAdvisor]

This definitely needs to be corrected, as it tends to be a pain for those of us who want to test the landing pages. AWA can you please add this as a bug to your weekly report?

I'd be happy to, inasisi.

An aside: as I recall, this is a tough one for the tech team to reproduce in our many test accounts - so if you're experiencing it, it would be much appreciated if you would write us from within the account in question - with some details, and a point towards the effected campaign(s).

Thanks!

AWA

[inasisi]

Well I have already raised it to your support team and they were the ones who came back with the temporary solution of turning it on and then turning it off. The ticket has been open for more than 10 days now. I do understand that any kind of code change takes a long time to design and fix. But just wanted to put the priority on it, especially given that it is a bug.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Well I have already raised it to your support team and they were the ones who came back with the temporary solution of turning it on and then turning it off. The ticket has been open for more than 10 days now. I do understand that any kind of code change takes a long time to design and fix. But just wanted to put the priority on it, especially given that it is a bug.

This is interesting. I've just heard back from the techsters, who tell me they felt they had this issue resolved earlier in the month.

Sounds as if it is still happening though. Any one else besides inasisi still having this happen?

(A voice inside my head keeps whispering "I wonder if it could have to do with caching?". So I wonder if it is worth clearing cache, starting with a fresh browser not arrived at from a bookmarked page, etc.?)

AWA

[Robsp]

AWA,

I also have a support call open on this one including a very clear sample in one of our campaigns (even including a reference to webmasterworld and AWA). I do not know if adding ads would trigger this.

This has been a problem for several months now and I would appriciate a fix, although the fix will cost G money :)

[bbcarter]

Interesting- from the other side, as a publisher, it had seemed to me that maybe they were serving the higher priced and higher CTR adwords ads only on G search results, and not on adsense publisher pages- haven't verified this with data yet, but...

is it a bug, or a G corporate revenue strategy that's being called a bug?

[inasisi]

This is definitely not a caching issue. I try looking the data for the prior dates and still this unevenness shows up. The customer support person also acknowledged the issue.