My goodness, HuskyPup, you know you will get the naysayers asking WHY oh WHY you put this thread up! lol

I am glad you did as I was planning on it myself. Clicks seem stuck to me too.

[edited by: WolfLover at 6:23 pm (utc) on June 8, 2009]

Why oh Why oh why-o. Why did I ever leave Ohi-o?

yep, but waited for someone else to ask ;)

Why oh Why oh why-o. Why did I ever leave Ohi-o?

I was IN that musical (Wonderful Town) in high school, for the roughly ten minutes I attended high school.

Nothing stuck here; I'm good.

Clicks seem stuck to me too.

Phew...come on G...clicks up 50%, it's looking a bit better now:-)

I'm not seeing any problems, just the general problem of Google's payouts being less and less.

I'm not seeing any problems, just the general problem of Google's payouts being less and less.

Amen.

Looks OK here. Average low earnings that are now the norm.

I am back in the 3 digit earnings.

May only 2 days with 3 digits,
June now the 3rd 3 digit day in a row, Starting Saturday.

Before the economic crisis, I had many month with only 3 digit days.

Of course I came to see if there was chatter to explain the drop. Low and behold. I'm off about 30% today, yesterday and Saturday. Saturday, I figured it was them playing with the system again.

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.

Stats are laggy here.

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?

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?

clicks, ctr, ecpm - all laggy

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.

Yesterday earnings +50% :-)
Today, stats look way behind and numbers very low.

Page impressions look pretty normal, the CTR / eCPM about half of what we'd consider normal.

Holy #*$! man. CTR has gone from 4% to todays all time low of 0 point bloody 5. #*$! is going on.

CPC should go down with the economy crisis, not CTR!

Page impressions look pretty normal, the CTR / eCPM about half of what we'd consider normal.

Same thing here.

Yep, mine's at a record low today too. I'm reasonably sure it'll come back.

realmaverick, hopefully it is just stuck then.

We are seeing the same. Earnings/clicks are about half what they usually are at this point in the day...

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.

CTR has gone down the swanny here also.

Odd- yesterday Monday the 8th of June ended up really pretty well though things were lagging.

Today June 9 I almost had coronary with half of the CTR that I normally have at around noon my time. Must be stuck again today.

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. Times a gazillion clicks, system-wide. Heck, AdWords and Analytics don't promise anything quicker than a three hour window (and it's often more than that with Analytics) and they're all tied together.

I'm going to try and force myself to only check the stats in the morning for the previous day. It's a waste of time checking multiple times a day when stats are frequently delayed so are meaningless to look at.

I'm going to try and force myself to only check the stats in the morning for the previous day. It's a waste of time checking multiple times a day when stats are frequently delayed so are meaningless to look at.

Amen. I bet this will save me a lot of unnecessary stress. I'm on-board.

> It is becoming extremely difficult to test any changes when the stats are so unreliable...

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]

My CTR, while still low, has more than doubled since I wrote my previous post, and clicks are rolling in now.

As far as testing - I don't know of any site, including one as large as the New York Times, where a 24 hour or less test would tell me anything useful.

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