Please bookmark this thread, and whenever you have an issue with Google adwords NOT reporting, add a post with the following information:
1. What country you are in.
2. What country the adwords ads are targetted to.
3. Date and Time (GMT timezone) of your last report.
Can anyone think of anything else? Perhaps if we pool our data, we'll figure out what the issue is.
Please understand, while this is NOT Google's Adword helpdesk, if we find a pattern, we'll at least know when to expect the reports not to be there.
1. What country you are in.
2. What country the adwords ads are targetted to.
3. Date and Time (GMT timezone) of your last report.
Does 1 and 2 really matter? I think reporting problems are seen in random accounts, irrespective of those two parameters.
Approximately 60 percent of my clients' accounts have varying degree of reporting delays - the worst one being 4 day delay (and still counting)
Google do not have a problem in delivering the traffic, it usually starts and stops within minutes of you instructing it on the control panel, if you see traffic continuing to show it is likely to be historical traffic from some time before (days before in some instances).
The issue is not ours to figure out. It's obvious that providing stats is harder than perceived for the number of advertisers it has now got, so victims of their own success.
We have some clients current, and some many days behind, no pattern, no geographic speread, no alphabetical bias.
It's frustrating for sure, but if you get an ad tracking tool in place you won't worry nearly so much and can act on things like negative keywords much quicker than waiting for Google to tell you what does and doesn't work.
"The issue is not ours to figure out. It's obvious that providing stats is harder than perceived for the number of advertisers it has now got, so victims of their own success."
How is Google the victim? Last I saw, they were still getting paid. I know of literally no other service where such a prolonged outage to an integral feature would be tolerated and even defended with such vigour than this one, primarily due, I suspect, to the Microsoft-like position Google holds in the world of PPC. The lack of communication via Google clearly states that they're big enough not to care if some of their customers call it a day. A nice position to be in, but not one conducive to a satisfying client / customer relationship.
And if I sound harsh, it's because it irritates me when someone who is obviously well-experienced and successful in the world of PPC shrugs off the valid concerns of those with less experience on the grounds that they themselves are doing alright, Jack, and have never experienced any problems, and if things do go wrong have the resources to minimise the impact.
I personally don't have a problem cause I use affiliate tracking software to track adwords (each ad is like an affiliate), but I do undestand your frustration and anger.
Again, the only thing any consumer can do is vote with his dollar bill.
I'm pretty sure google is trying their best to fix it, and I agree with webdiversity that it's not an easy task to serve so many people.
And saying something like "well, if you offer a service - you MUST be good at it from all angles" is simly childish. The whole world is built on taking risks, estimating, approximating, and messing up :) That's the way it is.
I'm not suggesting that any service should function 100% all the time, and at no point did I say I was. All I'm saying is that when things go wrong (a) the customer should be given as much information as possible, at regular intervals (b) the fault should be fixed in a reasonable period of time and (c) where feasible, the customer should be compensated either monetarily, via enhanced service options or reduced price services. This is a basic business concept that 99% of businesses subscribe to, so why are we not seeing it?
Again, I do not wish to appear abrasive, but to try to excuse the failings of a company based on the fact it's massively successful is just plain wrong. The degradation of a service based on a continuing and much-promoted influx of customers is the absolute definition of greed.
Unfortunately my dollar is worth squat. I'm not interested in teaching anyone a lesson, nor in cutting my nose off to spite my face, I'm just trying to make a few quid on my extremely small and new business. In a nutshell, I can't afford to f*** around and swap providers every ten minutes or buy extra s/w or whatever, like the big businesses can.
Anyway, apologies for continuing the OT theme. I shall try to be more constructive in future posts, but if people are satisfied with what they've got that's great - nice one and good luck - but please, sit back and let others who have issues air them and complain where necessary without telling them that they should be grateful for what they've got. I might not yet understand the complexity of adwords and PPC but I am well up to speed on the concepts of good customer service, both how to achieve it and when I'm not getting it.
Google do keep fixing the problem, but it keeps breaking. My points were that they are delivering traffic, always have and probably always will, mainly because they've worked hard to get the hardware and software in place to make search work. With Adwords it's still a fairly new system, so is bound to go wrong. Google don't have a big PR machine with tons of customer service people.
There have been many focus groups where advertisers have been invited to discuss the program and the things that don't work, wish lists etc.. so although publicly they might not seem to care, I know that deep down they do care and will be working on the solutions/ideas to make the product better.
The last thing Google hold in the world of PPC is a Microsoft like position.
A SLA of near 100% should be what we get, and we're not and I am just as annoyed that we can't get this data as the next person. We charge a percentage of our clients expenditure so without the exact spend can't invoice them.
If half the advertisers Google had stopped tomorrow the problem of reporting would vanish, that's what I meant by being a victim of their success, I'm no Google suck up, or unpaid sales person.
Sorry if my comments seemed flippant, weren't meant to be taken that way.
I don't particularly expect to get one, but if others were to ask as well, it could increase the pressure on them to fix the problem ASAP.
Andy.
Frankly I'm quite surprised, but good on them.
Nice one!
Some of the ads I deleted because my internal stats showed they produced negative ROI were still displayed for days.
That's not just reporting. It's the account management!
And the number of clicks on all ads is much higher than I can actually confirm. I have unique urls for each ad in each ad group in each campaign and my own count is much-much lower.
It's not like a small difference you usually get when comparing stats with two parties, but a huge overcount.
Well, I sent them a note and if I don't get a response tomorrow morning, I guess, I'll call my bank and cancel their charges.
Let's see what happpens :(
P.S. Honestly did not expect something like that from google.
Hope I'm not speaking too soon here.
Hope I'm not speaking too soon here.
I don`t think you are. Looks like they have fixed the delay problem as far as I can see from the campaigns that we currently are running.
Most of my stats are up-to-date (ish) now, and daily overspends have been refunded, but bcc1234's deleted ads accruing clicks are a real problem that needs to be addressed.
One more thing, I'm note sure about it, but will double check today - I had some listings set at $0.05 with a minimum CPC of $0.30. So they were not supposed to be shown, I just kept them as keywords for future reference, but they were shown and I was charged $0.30 per click! - Something I never agreed to pay for such broad terms (and they were pretty broad and useless).
Again, I'm not sure if that's the case, but I'll check it with my tracking data and post back.
If anybody had any keywords with bids below google's minimum cpc, please check your accounts and let us know if you can confirm/deny it.
AdWords will be offline in 14 Minutes for 1 Minute.
Never saw such alerts before.
It's also got the :
*Reporting is not real-time. Clicks and impressions received in the last 12 hours may not be included here.
Such is life. This a UK advertiser and showing globally.
Could this be a factor for the problems?
Some of my clients (having different accounts) have long delays, other only a few hours...
so it is not the country that matters
but at 4 p.m. GMT the server becomes VERY slow on all accounts
