Why not live stats on adsense

as the pro. companies in that category

[zeus]

Today I have just started again using adsense to see if there payout has improoved, but then I remembered that the stats is not live, thats realy a pain when you want to make ajustements, then you have to wait hours before your can see the results.

[mack]

Not an easy one to answer, but I imagine security is at least part of the reason that statistics are not live.

Also if the system was do provide live stats think now much more computing resouces would be involved in delivering this data. Batching the stats is probably a lot more secure and less system intensive.

Mack.

[zeus]

Yes that has also been my thinking of this, but but a every 15 min. update must be possibele.

[hunderdown]

Given the random element in our stats, and such known factors as Smart Pricing only updating weekly, how useful would 15 minute updates be? You need to let things run, see how they work on different days of the week, different times of day--or don't you?

I guess I'm asking what kind of changes are you making that you can accurately evaluate the effectiveness of them with 15 minutes of stats?

[zeus]

Well hunderdown if you got about 75.000 unique visits a day, a lot happens on 15 min. and there can also been earn some in 15 min.

[hunderdown]

Of course--I realize that on a large site there's plenty of activity in 15 minutes! But, for example, you could make a change that produced positive results from 4:15 PM to 4:30 PM but negative results at some other time.

I don't put much faith in the RELIABILITY of what I see over a small period of time.

So I think there's actually some benefit in the stats not updating that regularly. We are forced to look at longer chunks of time, and get a better average over that period of time.

[aeiouy]

Even if it were live updates, it would be really ill-advised to be making changes to your advertising based on up to the minute data. Even if your site was extremely busy it would be a very bad idea.

[caspita]

If not live stats at least coordinated stats would be good, even if they come every 30 mins or 1 hour I think.

Today for example for some test channels used in low traffic pages I have this:

PI Clicks P.CTR P.eCPM Earnings
==================================
212 0 0.00% 0.07 $0.01
13 0 0.00% 0.04 $0.00
32 0 0.00% 0.01 $0.00

This is comming in the very first "Today's Earnings" page, where you get the total and then a quick click to "top channels" show you only the performing channels, channels with impression and no earnings are not suppose to be shown, but I can see the above ones as "top channels". Very odd, I'm not sure if this is bacause clicks not updated at same time with impressions or because I'm being CPM targeted. I have not seen any CPM on this pages, but I don't want to refresh them to much because I'm doing a test with them.

[elfred]

IMHO, live stats are not absolutely necessary. What I would really appreciate is a "known delay". If I see that between 05:00 AM and 07:00 AM I see 0 hits out of 2000 impressions, it would be nice to know whether it's due to some kind of delay, to untargeted banners or to anything else.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Absolute liveness is not compatible with the (efficient) distributed system that G is trying to run.

(It's not even possible in theory (ie because of General Relativity), though that's a matter of degree and so let's not fight about it! B^>)

I note that TribalFusion gives much more nearly-live stats, but has a less-good GUI and makes me much less money, so I continue to prefer AS!

Rgds

Damon

[aeiouy]

I have found I can check my adsense stats in the morning for the previous day and they are final. So this makes it useful enough that I can review the data and keep track of it.

Even when I used to check more often, it wasn't terribly useful.

[elfred]

I wrote some scripts that access AS stats and put the values in a database. The hourly distribution of earnings, impressions and clicks is quite interesting to see. Having a look at such generated graphs is much more informative than a single look at the stats for the previous day.

[ZenArcher]

Definitely, elfred. To paraphrase an oft-quoted comment, "data is king". Watching the sweep of clicks and earnings move from Asia though Europe to the Americas can be quite enlightening. Some regions will surprise you with their strong CTRs and strong advertisers.

With a steady stream of traffic, tracking the hourly earnings becomes critical. Why? If something's gone wrong--with targetting, with the advertisers, or worse, with your own server--you'll know it, and can respond by diverting your traffic stream to another page or site.

The dynamic nature of this advertising medium demands flexibility.

The race goes to the swift.

[zeus]

Ok I also dont think we will see live stats, but maybe if it showed from 01:00 -01:30 130 clicks ecm 1$, then see how it changes every hour, so maybe you should remove the banners at the bad period.

As said before Im just testing adsense again to see if there payouts have improved, but I think they will when Yahoo and MSN goes into the market.