50% slump in CTR from 1-jan-12

[William Ferguson]

OK, I have 4 complete days of data now and its not looking any
brighter.

Starting 1-Jan-12 my CTR has slumped by over 50% (along with eCPM and
revenue). I understand that it's possible that some advertising
budgets expired at the end of last year and have yet to be renewed,
but it didn't seem to happen at the end of last financial year (which
I would have thought would be more greatly impacted) and 50+% slump
seems a tad severe.

Is this a standard state of affairs or is it an accounting glitch?
Any idea on when things might return to normal?

William

[kunal verma]

Yup i too see upto 50% downfall in earnings starting 1st jan 2012

[William Ferguson]

Hm, looks like it's probably both ad budget expiry AND an accounting
snafu (or the click fraud bot has gone into overdrive).

Admob clicks versus actual ad clicks on the device were running at 92%
up until 31-DEC. Ie 8% of clicks were being ignored, presumably
because they we running foul of whatever click fraud algorithm Admob
is running.

From 1-JAN to 4-JAN the ratio has plummeted to 56%. Ie almost half of
all clicks are being ignored, and more than a third more clicks are
being ignored than they were prior to 1-JAN.

Eric?


William

On Jan 6, 12:10 pm, kunal verma <kunal0072...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yup i too see upto 50% downfall in earnings starting 1st jan 2012
>

> On Jan 6, 2012 4:50 AM, "William Ferguson" <william.ferguson...@gmail.com>

[William Ferguson]

OK, this has gone beyond annoying now.
From the 1-Jan-2012 up to and including the 9-Jan-2012 the number of
clicks being ignored by the Admob reporting remains at 56%.

This is a massive and abrupt change with a corresponding abrupt drop
in revenue.
There has been no change in my app, nor as far as I can tell in my
user base. The change in figures reported by Admob happened abruptly
on 1-JAN-2012.

What the hell is going on?

William



On Jan 6, 1:30 pm, William Ferguson <william.ferguson...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[William Ferguson]

To those interested in how to count Ad clicks yourself, it's quite
simple.
Just configure an AdListener on your AdView and record whenever
#onPresentScreen is invoked (this is called after an Ad is clicked and
the Ad Activity is been displayed to the user).
Eg

adView.setAdListener(new AdListener() {
..
@Override
public void onPresentScreen(Ad ad) {
if (AppConstants.DEV_LOGGING) Log.v(AppConstants.TAG,
"onPresentScreen (ads)");
getAnalytics().sendAdClicked();
}
..
});


IMHO AdMob needs to come clean and report upon all the clicks being
made in an App and the number of clicks that are summarily being
ignored. We're paid on a per click basis and at this point we're
expected to take whatever number of clicks reported by Admob as
verbatim. Why aren't we being paid for all clicks? If some clicks need
to be discounted for some reason then Admob should own up and make
that clear in the reporting. I can't go to the local store, grab six
bottles of drink and only decide to pay for 3. Well I can, but then
that's theft.

William


On Jan 11, 9:04 am, William Ferguson <william.ferguson...@gmail.com>

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

The slump in eCPM and earnings is just a result of the holiday season ending, it being a new year, etc.  There are no known issues here that are compounding this effect.  I still can't really explain your CTR inconsistency.

A note to the group: We are trying to keep the discussion boards on a technical level as it relates to the AdMob SDK.  Please don't post publisher related questions to the forum.  Instead, please refer to the AdMob Help Center and if the Help Center can't answer your publisher related questions, find the appropriate contact form within the Help Center to contact AdMob.  For this example, Developer Troubleshooting --> Performance problems seems most appropriate.

Thanks,

Eric