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?

[rustybrick]

A stretch here, but maybe related to same issue with Google Analytics?

Happened about the same time?

See [twitter.com...] and [twitter.com...]

[HuskyPup]

Got the first hour and that's it, standstill again...the hamster's have been replaced sloths!

[dataguy]

"We are reprocessing the data and expect to have it all corrected by early next week. More updates to come. #googleanalytics" Good call, rustybrick.

I've confirmed with my notes that my AdSense data for the 6th has been updated. It's like they've found about 30% more clicks, raising my CTR, CPM and revenue accordingly. This puts Wednesday and Thursday in line with normal days. WooHoo!

[pawas]

Whatever the change is, I am loving it. Saw 40% increase in revenue and clicks on 6th and 7th.

[johnnie]

Still no love. Today seems very, very laggy again.

[mhale]

Thursday is still on the "low end of normal." Friday (today) is not horrible (too soon to tell). I hope that this is just waiting to be updated. It doesn't seem right as it is now. Time will tell!

[whywhywhy]

Stuck this morning... i know that friday is always low, but no like that

[jmccormac]

Minor click dump but still slow.

Regards...jmcc

[Rodeo]

Not stuck but definitely on the lower side, happens sometimes.

[sugarrae]

"this many of you depend on goog for a paycheck? c'mon guys."

I definitely don't depend on Google for a paycheck. I also am going to bitch if my earnings are down several hundred dollars per day. Principle.

[hal12b]

I'm VERY glad I no longer use Adsense and deal with this CRAP! Sorry to everybody else...

[J_RaD]

Realistically, for many of us, the choice is either Adsense or selling directly (which is more work).

those aren't your only 2 options to making some cash online, I use neither of those.

[londrum]

i think we're being a little harsh on google. lots of companies pay their bills late, its part and parcel of doing business.
as long as they do pay, then its not a problem. its only 1 or 2 days late. and seeing as they dont actually hand over any money until the end of the month anyway... what does it matter? it doesn't really affect us at all.

the real problem is that we never know how much they owe. if they missed this problem (which is entirely possible, because they must have overlooked it for 1 day at least), presumably they would have kept the money and we would have been none the wiser.

how many times have you overlooked a bill, only to receive a phone call from the supplier chasing up his money? how many times have you had a customer on the phone chasing up his refund? google never gets those phone calls. (...not that we could phone them anyway because they dont even give us a number... but thats a seperate issue)

if they overlook some clicks then nobody knows.

[J_RaD]

Once that click happens it's OUR money, not theirs, and nobody wants to be cheated!

Just like people still balance their bank accounts and check their credit card bills to make sure nobody is taking advantage or making clerical errors either.

yes I understand that im just shocked to see so many people here make their $$$$ from running goog ads on their website. Post a topic about adsense and it spools out to 10 pages in the 1st 5 mins. Scary, goog adwords isn't exactly a long term income strategy.

[incrediBILL]

i think we're being a little harsh on google.

Being a little harsh?

No transparency, no accountability, no customer service.

If this were the CABLE TV company and the cable system was down every time there was a football game on TV, the cable company would've been burned to the ground years ago.

However, the Cable TV company, unlike Google, has the common courtesy to at least give "weather" information about outages and known issues in your area when you try to look up what's wrong or call the 800#

At least the Cable company has an 800#!

It's crap like this that leads to government regulations when the masses finally get sick of it and revolt.

im just shocked to see so many people here make their $$$$ from running goog ads on their website.

Why? What do you consider long term?

AdSense has been paying me solidly since 2004, that's 6 years, which is about 3 years longer than most start-up companies I've worked for have survived. Prior to that I managed to monetize my site from 1996 with fastclick, double click, affiliate programs and other stuff and if AdSense fails we'll find other sources again. AdSense is just easier to deploy and pays better than most which is why so many are at the Google's webmaster welfare watering hole.

[JCKline]

Same here. IMO, I think all the "real" advertisers are holding off a little until the holidays get closer. I've seen this every year in the beginning of October, then things pick up just before November.

[BillyS]

the real problem is that we never know how much they owe. if they missed this problem (which is entirely possible, because they must have overlooked it for 1 day at least), presumably they would have kept the money and we would have been none the wiser.

You'd be naive to think the system worked like that... I'm sure it doesn't. Why? Because I've helped to build similar systems on a smaller scale. You'd have to bypass multiple system checks to pull that off. Red flags would be going up all over the company.

I suspect that Google had a problem starting on Tuesday, around 10:00 am Eastern time. I look at Analytics data on a hourly basis and there was a hole in the data for nearly 2 hours. I suspect they lost the set of servers that processes the Analytics, Adwords, and Adsense data. I don’t think they lost the data itself, I think they lost the systems responsible for assembling and reporting that data.

When they brought those systems back online, they needed to do some catch up. They needed to reprocess the data into the information we see as Adsense earnings and Analytics. That explains the talk of catching up. They're continuing to process new data and using "spare" capacity to reprocess the missing data.

I don't know why people would think Google has the capability of cheating us. Do you think they'd be able to recode their systems so that only Adwords advertisers would pay and Adsense publishers wouldn't get paid? Do you think they're going to change code to pull this off - or somehow they're going to process millions of transactions by hand?

Unless we have Enron happening over at Google, let's not get paranoid.

[tristanperry]

yes I understand that im just shocked to see so many people here make their $$$$ from running goog ads on their website. Post a topic about adsense and it spools out to 10 pages in the 1st 5 mins. Scary, goog adwords isn't exactly a long term income strategy.

Adwords /= AdSense.

Plus the thread didn't reach 10 pages in the first 5 mins.

Anywhoo: plently of people make good money via AdSense. And have been for a while.

What do you consider a "long term" income strategy, by the way?

'Offline' jobs? Nope, you can be made redundant (fired).

Selling eBooks? Nope, any number of things (increased Govt legislation?) could stop that.

Use a different big advertising network? Yep, that Yahoo! Publisher Network looks good. Oh wait.

Etc.

AdSense income can be great. And long term. It's not the only way to make money online, but it's certainly not the worst?

[bwnbwn]

Adsense pays for 2 employees paychecks in our office and has since 2004. As I reported here [webmasterworld.com...] we had a monster click and revenue dump of a months worth of both clicks and revenue.
I was sent nothing to explain it just a monster dump. I have no idea how long of a period this dump covered nothing just one day poof double the amount.

IMO Google does try to keep a clean house but given the number employees working in the system and the amount of data they process I can understand these types of issues. I do feel though Google does try when discovered get the money into the correct account if that data can be traced.

[netmeg]

im just shocked to see so many people here make their $$$$ from running goog ads on their website.

Umm. Hello? This is the AdSense forum.

[shoreline]

Glitterbal,

Microsoft does have an alternative with their beta program and depending on the site, it pays as much or more than adsense. Hopefully, the beta won't be as long as Yahoo's was :)

[netmeg]

I dunno, I'm in the adCenter Publisher beta and have never been able to make it pay anywhere near as well. The Yahoo/Bing ad integration starts Monday; maybe that will improve it. But so far it's a big honking goose egg for me.

[cien]

Yesterday was very close to a record breaking day. Having a super good day today and it is only 7:47 am. CTR is way up.

Edit for the rest of my post: Adsense reporting is just fine today. I accidentally counted part of yesterday's data on Statcounter. Adsense # of clicks reported matches Statcounter's so far today.

[edited by: cien at 3:00 pm (utc) on Oct 8, 2010]

[graeme_p]

@J_Rad, I know that they are not the only two options that exist. I said that they are the only two options for many of us, by which I mean certain people running certain sites.

I could use something else, but it would involve running different sites and.or moving to a different county.

[londrum]

You'd be naive to think the system worked like that... I'm sure it doesn't.

i wasn't suggesting that they'd do it deliberately. im no fan of google, but i know they wouldn't do that. i was just saying that if they missed the problem, or had some kind of problem and lost some data, and missed some clicks, then how are we supposed to know? we have no way of checking what they owe.

[graeme_p]

I wonder whether they have introduced a change (probably a significant increase) in the lag in counting clicks? That would cause a drop while it was going into effect.

[indyank]

I dunno, I'm in the adCenter Publisher beta and have never been able to make it pay anywhere near as well. The Yahoo/Bing ad integration starts Monday; maybe that will improve it. But so far it's a big honking goose egg for me.

i am sure that it will continue to be so...Microsoft knows only to get money from you and to never give away...if they change, it will be the biggest shock....

[newborn]

Yeah today is really slow...

[whywhywhy]

Slow update
+
Lack of ads
___________
= BAD DAY

[zdgn]

I think I might be the only exception here! :D

Not only my stats seemed to have survived the storm, I'm being compensated with unusually huge chunks of dumps for apparently no dips or shortfalls! Yay! (BTW I primarily monitor all my sites through Analytics, could that be it?)

Or... may be I'm getting too lazy poring over stats for so many profiles every day.

But thanks Google, I'll take it! :D