Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Doing some checking, it seems that the daily spend limit auto checkers used for Adwords advertisers were down for maintenance while publishers and advertisers were unable to get into their accounts.
One of my Adwords campaigns was overserved and overclicked - and my daily totals for my campaign were nearly 14x my daily limit, and well over half of those clicks were for content sites running AdSense.
Without these daily spend checkers in place, Adwords would have kept serving the highest paying ads throughout the day while it was unable to check on how much had been spent for the day. This resulted in a much higher EPC for publishers, since the ads were not rotated out for lesser paying ads when the first ads were nearing their spend limit for the day.
My campaign triggered an Adwords payment, which resulted in a very large overspend credit before the payment was processed. Which means Google is out of pocket for that money, since as an advertiser, if Google serves over 20% of my daily spend limit, it automatically credits me that overserved amount, no matter if it is 20% over or 14x over that limit.
The Google AdSense terms do include a clause about advertiser non-payment, but it does not include anything about publishers not being paid for clickthroughs that were overserved on an Adwords account, for which Google does not receive payment for.
From the payment section of the Terms:
Google reserves the right to withhold payment or charge back Your account <shortened> in the event that an advertiser whose Ads are displayed on Your Site(s) defaults on payment for such Ads to Google.
Chances are this is why some/many publishers did see such a large and unexpected spike for Sunday, a day when CTR and EPC are lower for many publishers. A nice holiday extra for publishers :)
maybe you should add "private investigator" on your business card ;-)
The only day to be as bad as these was the first day I started when I only had it on 1 page and on 1 site :(
Simon.
Looks like "...for some AdSense publishers" if we're going to be accurate here.
ncw164x
I talked about it more from an Adwords point of view [webmasterworld.com]. AdWordsAdvisor called it free advertising for the advertisers ;)
But i'm getting hit with nearly all time low EPC yesterday and today, so it looks like they are trying to get that money back...
I don't think so. I was one of those with high EPC on Sunday (1.5x my average). While yesterday was very low (but not my lowest), today is high again, but not as high as Sunday.
My Sunday earnings were way up also. It was my biggest earning day so far. The traffic and clicks were normal, I just had a higher than normal EPC.
I hope that over time enough advertisers come into the program to drive the EPC up to that level on a regular basis. :)
