Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I displayed the AdSense Unit Data report for the month to date, then sorted by impressions. Only one of my 160x600 towers is showing any impressions at all, yet every page of my site has this unit. That can't be right.
Stranger is that none of these units in any size show any clicks. None. Zero. Yet I've been getting clicks that show in my other reports - but those may have been on the old leaderboard units since I haven't replaced any leaderboards as they're going away with a site redesign.
I really smell a bug.
I am astounded by the rather poor quality control at Google!
K
When Google launches a Beta product, it is inviting you into its testing laboratory. The product isn't finished and Google is quite open about it. (It is usable and hence "Beta" rather than "Alpha", though your idea of what makes something usable and Google's may differ).
If you imagine it should be finished and can see that it isn't then you will get frustrated.
If you accept that it isn't finished and have minimal expectations, then you will watch the product develop with interest.
The assumption held by some that everything accessible on the web should be finished has never been correct.
We used to - I'm sure you remember! - put up "men at work" signs and write "Under Construction" everywhere to try to remind people of this fact. Just because we don't do that anymore doesn't mean lots of unlabelled things are not still under construction.
At some point in 1999-2001 big corporations came along and decided (from their offline experience) that everything should remain on their hard drives until it was completely ready. They decided that the publicly accessible web was only for things that were "finished".
I have never agreed with this approach. I have no problem with people wandering into my virtual workshop while I am at work on something. I can see that Google doesn't seem to mind either.
A professional approach would have been to make the new Adsense Units available as a separate release, giving publishers the option of migrating to it, but with the safety net of being able to return to the earlier version if there were problems. Support for the old version could then be withdrawn at an appropriate time. This would have kept everybody happy, but instead the continual tweaking of live systems is giving Google an image problem.
I agree with HarryM here. I know that I should not expect too much from a "beta" product, but Google seem to introduce new features to live commercial products that clearly have either not been tested at all (or not thoroughly enough) or have not gone through a sufficient rollout plan.
Adsense is responsible for how much of Google's bottom line? I remember the value to be about 20% or so. So we talk about billions of PROFIT here. And they introduce features to the product that do not work? Please. This IS embarrassing for a company (supposedly) worth about US$ 200,000,000,000.
I used to work for a big US ISP, and we had very very very tight QA requirements when launching features, so I know what I am talking about. As I said before, now that they are so valuable, Google might want to reconsider their approach to testing and rollout management.
And they introduce features to the product that do not work? Please.
I'm not sure I understand.
As far as I can see Google has almost always adopted the approach that its products are its products not anyone else's. Yes, there are lots of extremely large companies which do lots of quality control before launching a product. Google hasn't done this time, but then, as far as I can recall, Google rarely has. Other companies like MS don't either.
There are two ways to run any company activity:
a) put the customer needs before the company needs; or
b) put the company needs before the customer needs
Numerous examples demonstrate that the sky doesn't fall when a company puts itself before the customer. Especially when the customer has no alternative service to turn to.
At the end of the day, it's up to Google how it runs each of its business activities. The only thing that will make Google do things differently, I assume, is some credible competition.
So, Adsense unit data is currently wrong. At some stage it will be sorted out. Hey, that's Google for you. It's not worth worrying about it, is it?
I learned a valuable business lesson in a provincial Russian town in 1996 when I entered a cafe at 21:50 with two friends and we asked for three cups of coffee. The cafe was due to close at 22:00 so we knew we only had ten minutes. "We've switched the kettle off," came the reply from the waitress.
Other companies like MS don't either.
Ronin, you don't seem to appreciate the point I was making. No matter how one might feel about MS, it's approach to production is very different to Google's. Bugs in a product such as Windows are sorted out, but the product does not change. New facilities are bundled into a new release.
This isn't a rant against Google. I just hope that Google stops acting like an entrepreneurial company and wakes up to the fact that it's become a production company.
Hmmm ...
KV
After launching the ad unit reporting feature, we found an issue that prevented clicks from being recorded correctly with the new reporting type, so we temporarily disabled the feature in all publishers' accounts. We'll make it available again as soon as we've resolved the issue. Sorry for the confusion.
The issue and temporary feature release didn't affect your aggregate clicks or earnings in any way, nor did they affect any other reporting types.
Thanks for your patience.
-ASA
After launching the ad unit reporting feature, we found an issue that prevented clicks from being recorded correctly with the new reporting type, so we temporarily disabled the feature in all publishers' accounts.
Thanks for updating us ... It only took 10 minutes of "AdSense Units" reports testing before it was abundantly clear that the results were wrong. I am amazed that this could have slipped through even the most basic alpha testing. Are there no real AdSense users at the Googleplexes?
While the apologies are noted, incidents like this do seriously undermine the trust in Google's accounting systems...
KV
Has anyone else experienced the same?
Should I assume that somehow the clicks and revenue are being recorded still or should I go back and replace the new code with old code?
Channels could then be reduced to, say, monitor earnings per web page or site ...
K
