Major AdSense Reporting Lag on Oct 6. 2010

Massive Click Dumps Being Reported Oct 7.

[Rodeo]

Just an hour or so to end oct 6, for around 10000 impressions this morning (Taiwan time, GMT+8), I'm seeing single digit earnings.
CTR has plummeted, eCPM is plummeted, and earnings worse this morning. Impressions are counting normally though.
Anyone seeing similar things?

[JCKline]

@loner, I have a "REAL" job, yet I rely on the extra income to help feed and raise my two children. If you haven't noticed, the economy (speaking for the US) is at it's worst. I am lucky to still have a job...for now. Taking a pay cut hurts when I was living month to month to begin with. Rant aside, complaining about this helps me to vent, however I am well aware of the fact it is out of my control. This is helping me to begin focusing more on what can someday be more concrete. I have a lot of "irons in the fire" that I am now focusing on even more.

What we need to do is focus on more than just AdSense income, but a little complaining about it first can actually be healthy for some, and help regain focus where it really counts.

[frank72]

Sorry for the long silence. My earnings are back to normal as well as the number of clicks.

This is what i did during the drop:

I opted for the "text and image ads" in the Google Adsense option to increase competition

I added extra space before and after each ads slot to increse cpm

I played with fonts to reduce eye blindness

Hope this tips will help somebody. They worked for me.

[cien]

I added extra space before and after each ads slot to increse cpm

Frank, care to elaborate on that? How does that work? Thanks for the tips.

[JCKline]

Frank, I was wondering the same thing as cien. Space before and after each ads slot to increse cpm?

[bwnbwn]

I don't know what's going on today but we are at a high days average total right now with 10 hours in the day left. Numbers are all the same it is ctr that has gone nuts. I have some really happy clickers hitting the sites today for some strange reason.

[ken_b]

Space before and after ad blocks.

There was an AdSense blog post about spacing recently. Here it is : Keeping the right distance [adsense.blogspot.com]

At any rate, my own take on tha is that it makes the ads stand out from the a bit more. That helps the ads not get skipped over by folks that are rapidly scanning a page, hence possibly higher CTR.

[frank72]

hello,
i read an article long ago and said that yes, blending the ads with you article or post increases the ctr (users will click the ads more because they wont recognize it as an "ads"). On the other hand, Google gives value to "aware clicks" meaning that Google gives value to those clicks that convert.
Clicks that convert are made by readers that know what they are doing, users that know that they are clicking an ads.
Now, the border between an "aware ads reader" and an "unaware ads reader" is really thin, but it "looks like " Google knows how to recognize him.
If you add space before and after your Google ads slot you will turn your ads to a "separated" entity in comparison to your article/post.

At the same time the ads will continue to be blended with your article/post because well...that space is only 1/2 of a inch, right?

"Apparently" Google increases the cpm if you add these spaces because its algo "thinks": Hey this ads is not blended with the article/post so a reader clicking it knows what he is doing, knows that it is an ads and he is willing to read it...

Personally speaking, After i added such space <br style="clear:both;" /> i noticed a better ctr/cpm and better conversions, so it worked for me.

Hope I have been clear and i also hope not to have made errors of any kind! lol

[nick28]

[Space before and after ad blocks.]
They at adsense bog recommend 150px space between flash player and ads and Google itself provide Youtube videos with inads.
Doesn't it seem to break own rule, because the video inads are most 468x60 ads close to play and fullscreen button and it comes very likely to accident clicks!
And seriousley, isn't "150px space" too much distance?
I don't believe that then any click comes, because the user would not click on ads which has wide distance to the object(in this case, flashplayer).
What do you think, friens?

[cien]

Thanks Frank and others for the info. Regarding ad blending with the content, I think that's against Adsense's TOS now, isn't it... Been awhile since I've read their TOS but I think that's the case now.

Anyway, like Bwnbwn reported, there are some click happy surfers out there today! It's 2:57 pm and I have already beaten yesterday's record by a long mile. CTR, IMPs, EPC are way up.

[jerdomainer]

Hey cien. Actually, blending Adsense with content is not against their TOS. I was told to try blending my ad block within the content just recently by an AdSense rep...

[cien]

Jerdomainer, this is what I meant: [google.com ] People were making a big issue out of this recently.

[jerdomainer]

ic...yeah, that is rather deceptive and SHOULD be against their TOS.

[Rodeo]

Here we go, another weird reporting just like Oct 6. 2 hours in to 21 October, the stats should have stabilized by now but it looks like Impressions reported are only 20% of what it should've been and eCPM CTR are in double figures. I've never seen this.

[cien]

11:16 pm. Horrible day, isn't it? Everything is low today for me.

[brassneck]

Definitely record breaking here - but unfortunately in the wrong direction.

Stephen.

[Play_Bach]

October, it's official - earnings have crashed. I'll be lucky to make half of what I did in September. :-(

[mhale]

The last few days were VERY good. Today doesn't look like it'll be VERY good, but quite good.

I had a few horrible years (starting at about 2007 until a few months ago) so I hope that this upswing will last a while for me. It is worrying that some of the rest of you are seeing such downturns!

[zerillos]

yesterday was closer to what it should be. (for the first time in over two weeks...)

today is low again....

[zerillos]

what i don't understand, and maybe someone will be able to help me,
is how come I see more than 400k impressions everyday in may stats, but G's stats says less than 70k impressions a day

[BillyS]

@zerillos - where are you seeing 400K impressions - you're not looking at "hits" are you? Depending on the page content, there will be a number of hits to the server to send all the content of one page impression.

how come I see more than 400k impressions everyday in may stats, but G's stats says less than 70k impressions a day

[dazzlindonna]

zerillos, many stats programs will count bot activity as human activity and that can add up to a lot of bogus impressions.

[londrum]

it might also be counting a hit for each file...
if youve got an html file, css stylesheet and external javascript on each page, then thats 3 'hits' when google will only count 1.

[zerillos]

nope, not looking at hits. hits are around 1 million per day...

my software recognizes bots and is not counting them, In any case, I allow only the well known bots, like googlebot and slurp etc.

the bots hit me around 600 k per month (that's hits, not pages). I suppose the pages are a lot less. let's say there are an average of 20k bot hits per day. judging from the general page/hit ratio, it means around 10k pages a day. but i bet it's a lot less than that.

400k pages a day-10k pages requested by bots is still a long way from G's stats...

[eniac]

sometimes ads may not shown on page. When I first look at a random page at my website, some of ads do not show, after F5, all ads show.

my impression in adsense and in counter are different too.

do you have similar problem? (not showing some ads sometimes)

[JCKline]

Two days ago it spiked back up, yesterday lower but OK.

[zerillos]

eniac
yes, it happens to me too. there are some pages that do not show ads. even if i try F5, ther are still no ads on them

[zerillos]

these pages however, are very few and I don't think they are the cause of the difference between my stats and G's...

I guess G does not have any ads that will be relevant to the content of those pages

[BillyS]

I guess G does not have any ads that will be relevant to the content of those pages

That really doesn't look like a good explanation. I see minor differences (10%), you're seeing multiples. Are you sure you're not blocking those pages from Adsense somehow?

[netmeg]

Maybe some of your users are using ad blockers too.

[zerillos]

no, I'm not blocking anything. i checked