After my post that AdSense was still broken, a Google rep posted to the Google Groups thread twice at 4:20 and 4:42 pm.
I'm still waiting on updates from my team on this issue... Thank you
all for your patience.(Changing the subject to something more descriptive to draw more users
to this thread.)
Somehow his subject change got overwritten with the original subject line (and seems to have been overwritten again), so the 4:42 p.m. post was just a note that he was changing the subject back to the one he'd previously changed it to.
Meanwhile, a user comment on my last blog entry caught my attention. The commenter (who oddly enough posted a love ode to AdSense on his blog the day before) mentioned that the problem had been going on since the Google AdSense reporting shut-down ("for maintenance") on Saturday. So I went and checked.
The reason I discovered it on Tuesday is because that's when the discrepancies became really glaring for me. I have a channel where the impressions are equal to between 90-91% of daily site impressions over on another site of mine. Watch how the numbers move...
- Thursday: 91%
- Friday: 90%
- Saturday: 86% (day of site maintenance)
- Sunday: 87%
- Monday: 65%
- Tuesday: 6.7%
- Wednesday: 0.6%
- Thursday: 19%
So, on Saturday and Sunday I could attribute the small discrepancy of a couple of percentage points to it being the weekend... if I even noticed. Monday, my overall numbers were decent and a quick glance at the breakdown didn't show a big enough discrepancy to catch my eye (the number was supposed to be 5 figures and it was). It wasn't until it was reporting 1/10th that number the next day that I became aware of this situation and started getting concerned. Then the next day revenues were off. My sitewide clickthrough rate was the lowest it had been in months, off by about 25% from my running average. Meanwhile, Google's reporting about 1/150th of the impressions I'm probably seeing on that channel.
Now, it's nice to see that the discrepancy was narrowed on Thursday, but not significantly, still reporting about 21% of what it probably should. In the first hour of Friday, the two updates are reporting that channel at 70% (1st) and 69% (2nd) of overall traffic, but we'll see how that looks at the end of the day.
So it does look like whatever was installed at the update on the 20th did cause the problem, and Google's got about 33 hours to fix it before the problem officially becomes a week old.
Where do we go from here, Google?