UPDATE:About an hour after this post, Google posted to the the AdSense Troubleshooting discussion thread that the problem had been fixed and they'd be working on retroactively fixing the bad reports from the past few days.

More and more people, posting to the AsSense Troubleshooting discussion thread are complaining not just about discrepancies between overall numbers and custom channels, but about their overall revenue numbers dropping. They're also complaining about Google's tight-lipped response to it: Google refusing to proactively communicate with webmasters and get out in front of this as it drags on (with there now being less than 24 hours before we hit the 1 week anniversary of the maintenance shutdown that seems to have been the starting point of all the craziness.

I was sort of ready to trust Google's claim that the overall numbers were correct, despite seeing my clickthrough rate drop so precipitously on Wednesday, since domain-based channels (a channel reporting all activity for a domain, as opposed to ones that tracked individual ad units or small groups of ad units) seemed to add up and show reasonably correct traffic numbers.

But this morning, when I went to check my numbers, one of my sites was all screwy. A lower-traffic site of mine that usually sees around 700-1000 hits a day was reporting 7 clicks for $0.89 as the full earnings for the domain. But on the three channels from that domain that were reporting clicks, they were reporting a combined 9 clicks for $1.84. Two clicks and $0.95 may not sound like much until you realize that in the numbers that are supposed to be low, Google's reporting more than twice the revenue than it's reporting for the numbers that are supposed to be accurate.

Now, the daily revenues for my entire account, as of 11 a.m., seem about right. They're in the middle of the range I've seen over the past few Fridays around this time (I can't help it, I check my AdSense numbers 5-8 times a day). So is this a sign that account-wide tracking is still okay, but now all channels are screwy, or does it mean something worse?

Probably the worst part about Google not getting out in front of this and being proactive about communicating with AdSense publishers is that Google's screwing with people's livelihoods. If this is still going on come Monday, I don't doubt that we'll start seeing the class action lawsuit vultures circling around Google.

When you start messing around with this much money owed to this many people, and you say "trust me" without actually doing things to make people feel trusting toward you, someone's going to start filing subpoenas. If you don't keep people's trust, they're going to want independent verification, and lawyers smelling blood will only be too happy to help them get it. Actually, at this point, Google's pissed off enough people and earned enough distrust with their silence, I'm not sure they will be able to avoid a class action. That will take a couple of years, earn a few lawyers a few million, and the webmasters who actually suffered through it will see a settlement where they get gift certificatse for $10 off anything they buy through Google Checkout.

All I know is that I'm not hiring a lawyer yet, but there may be people who are not as patient or forgiving as me. Still, if you're a big enough publisher where this is putting enough money in jeopardy to call a lawyer, you also probably have a Google account executive who is working to smooth your ruffled feathers. It's all of us smaller publishers who do a few hundred to a few grand monthly instead of daily that get to be treated like mushrooms... kept in the dark and fed manure.

Whatever the problem, whatever the solution, Google needs to start communicating. The visible problem is getting more and more concerning, and if Google doesn't start offering information voluntarily, someone's going to go get a court order for it. And when lawyers get involved, no one really wins.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.