Forum Moderators: martinibuster
EPC at its new "higher for the moment" norm, Page Impressions etc all seem normal.
Anyone else?
Clicks seem stuck to me too.
Phew...come on G...clicks up 50%, it's looking a bit better now:-)
Sunday, I was floored. slammed to the mat. Blamed it on the sunny weekend for a change.
Now, I see that three major, long term advertisers in my nitch have pulled their ads on search results at google.com as well as on my site. They normally compete for the #1 spot and bid fairly high to get there on weekdays before supper.
Why all three suddenly pulled their budgets is one of life's great mysteries. It is an odd time of June to pull the budgets, and have no ads at all.
The ads now showing are less relevant.
Thinking the dogs of summer have officially arrived.
I wonder where these clicks get stuck?
Are they being held on "my ad server" whilst the main "metrics server" is under load pressure and as its load eases the clicks from my server are released?
Or maybe my clicks went through a "new" verification system that allows impressions but waits to confirm validity?
Nice overnight click dump for me which obviously came in the last 6 hours since they weren't there at 2 am!
I wonder where these clicks get stuck?
Maybe it's related to the time zone. I'm in PST and my stats are usually complete by 1 AM. I think those click dumps are related to manual review, which means they're probably sitting at Google waiting to be approved.
My guess is the stats are lagging for some of us... hopefully.
I just wish we had more data from G regarding the timeliness of our stats... It is becoming extremely difficult to test any changes when the stats are so unreliable...
Last week I made a change, testing my site for day... restored since my earnings plummeted... then come to find out the stats were just slow to update...
It is very tiresome and wasteful of our time to not be providing us (their partners) with a little more information on what time period our stats are valid for, and if they are up-to-date.
I don't think we'll ever get real time stats simply because there are those that will try to game them. As long as there are criminals, there's no way Google is going to do anything but try to protect itself and part of that equation is to keep the crooks guessing.
[edited by: Play_Bach at 6:27 pm (utc) on June 9, 2009]
I just assume it's got to be taking longer to price out clicks these days - there are more publishers, ever changing advertisers, more fraud, all kinds of traffic, other anomalies I can't think of at the moment - all of which has to be analyzed before assigning a value to a click.
I wonder if there is an earnings opportunity for Google to introduce some type of flat-pricing component - not instead of PPC, but as a compliment - maybe something along the lines of blogads.
I realize it appears that placement targeting seems to be an attempt of sorts, but the implementation is too clumsy and complex. Something simple would be nice - simple for the advertiser (AdWords side) and the publisher (AdSense side).
FarmBoy