knofun

I have always been a big fan of Google’s AdSense product, and I use it on a bunch of my sites. Early on I used other networks like Burst! or Fastclick/Valueclick, and even flirted with doubleclick for a bit. I always felt like I was kind of a sleazy webmaster by running those ads, you know the blinking ones that say “You have 16 messages waiting” and shit like that. I always preferred adsense because they would display ads that were relative to my content, not some random ad targeted to the lowest common denominator to harvest zip code submits. Sure, advertising like this will always exist because there is a market for it, just like P.T. Barnum told us.

So naturally I was bummed out when I heard about Google’s $3.1 Billion check for Doubleclick. And then I was even more bummed out when I saw this ad today:

For shame. On the good side, this opens the door for a lot of startups in the ad space. Surely someone can do better than this!

web marketing adsense, advertising, affiliate, webmaster

So for the last three days Google Adsense has not been reporting properly. I guess I am spoiled by the big G always being so on point, so I am a little confused by this one. The situation is when you login to your normal Adsense control panel you are presented with an overall view of that day’s earnings and you can hit a dropdown for detailed stats by channel. Every Adsense publisher I know uses channels to optimize and track their ads, this is a heavily used feature of the program. To have it not working is disheartening to say the least.

I understand that every website / program has problems from time to time, but usually Goog will let us know on the Adsense Blog or something. Jensense hasn’t even posted anything, and she is usually on every little rumor. The only peep from Google has been users posting Adsense support responses on DigitalPoint:

Hi,

Thanks for your email. There appears to be an issue with channels not
properly tracking data, rest assured your aggregate data is registering
all impressions and clicks.

I’ve escalated your issue to one of our tech specialists. We’ll get back
to you shortly. I appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

Sean
The Google AdSense Team

My guess? The last post on the Official Adsense Blog is about being able to manage your ad units from your control panel as opposed to modifying the code on your pages. This probably involves you being able to change things by ad unit and channel, and somewhere in there they had a bug in the reporting code. But come on Goog, let us know!!!

update: Seems to be working better but still showing a disparity between aggregate stats and channel stats. Google Groups has some more info as well.

geek stuff, web marketing adsense, google