Sudden drop in reported impressions

[Colin Smith]

Because of the way I display interstitial ads in one of my apps, I consistently see requests being about 50% higher than impressions (eg: 150,000 requests, is generally about 100,000 impressions). This has been the case since I switched to AdMob about 5 months ago. For some reason, my stats for yesterday showed 150,000 requests, but only 60,000 impressions. When I look at the stats for all the Android variants of this app, I'm seeing the same thing - but not on the iOS ones. Given that there have been some changes to the Google Play Services leaderboard layout (& other things) starting yesterday, I'm guessing there was a new SDK released, plus I am also seeing a new crash (that others have reported) related to AdMob.

Anyone else seeing a sudden drop in their impressions stats, or the requests to impressions ratio?

 - Colin. 

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

For interstitials, an impression is only counted when you show it. So if you preload interstitials and they end up not getting shown, that counts as a request, positively contributes towards fill rate (assuming it did fill), but no impression.

[Matt Sivad]

I have the same issue.  It's not that the requests and impressions don't match up, it's the ratio.  No changes in my app, and no other indication of changes reported by AdMob (fill rate is constant at >99.9%).

As you can see in the image, requests (blue line) continued the same track I've been seeing but the impressions (green) have dropped off from it for the last two days (the last data point is a partial obviously).  There has never been a significant departure of the ratio before.

[Colin Smith]

Hi Eric,

I understand the difference between requests & impressions, however that wasn't the point of my post. I have always seen requests about 50% higher than impressions, because I preload the ad at the start of each game & users sometimes restart the game without getting to the end - so the ad is never shown. My concern is that up until yesterday, that 50% higher request to impressions rate was very consistent, but now it seems to have changed to over 100%. If you look at the attached graph, you will see what I mean. Why in the last 2 days is there a sudden large increase in the difference between requests vs. impressions? The weird thing is that the CTR & Impression RPM have gone up at the same time, so the net effect on revenue seems to be minimal - however it really makes me wonder how accurate any of these numbers are (both before & after the change) when they can suddenly change like this.

[Colin Smith]

Scratch my last comment - what I really meant to say is that it's clear something has changed in the way these numbers are reported, but there has been no explanation as to what or why...

[Colin Smith]

Oh - & to reiterate, this is ONLY happening on my Android apps. The exact same apps on iOS that are showing ads in exactly the same way, are still reporting about 50% higher requests vs. impressions.

[Xavier Guillemane]

I have the exact same issue with my interstitial. Reported impressions have been divided by 5 since yesterday !

[Delka Nenova]

I have the same issue.

All our Ads are interstitial in Android devices. Since 2 days ago our impressions drop to half or less.

 

Our average request/impresions was 25,000 / 16,000 but now is 25,000 / 7,000 . Because this CTR is more than double now

[Xavier Guillemane]

3rd day in a row with this issue...

[Matt Sivad]

I'm also showing interstitials on Android.  Like everyone else, the CTR I'm seeing has gone up significantly (I really doubt more than 7% of users are clicking on these ads), so for CPC ads this is not a revenue issue.

However for the small percentage of ads that are sold CPM, this will really crush earnings.  In an admittedly small sample, the CTR for CPM ads yesterday was over 30%, and it is usually about 10%.

[Lee Boze]

Same problem here.  To confirm:

No changes to APK or admob account

Steady user numbers

Steady ad requests

Steady clicks and revenue

50%+ fall in reported impressions

Date-----------Requests-------Impressions
9/14/2014-------40,742-------21,396
9/15/2014-------36,946-------19,236
9/16/2014-------38,533-------20,171
9/17/2014-------36,654-------19,098
9/18/2014-------36,019-------18,552
9/19/2014-------37,058-------19,364
9/20/2014-------38,353-------19,871
9/21/2014-------41,297-------21,611
9/22/2014-------37,178-------18,883
9/23/2014-------39,614-------20,139
9/24/2014-------37,279-------19,357
9/25/2014-------35,958-------15,455
9/26/2014-------35,582-------11,847
9/27/2014-------36,769-------9,647

9/28/2014-------38,235-------8,546 

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

I'd recommend filling out https://support.google.com/admob/v2/contact/performance_issues to contact product support.

[Colin Smith]

Thanks Eric - I have submitted a performance issue report.

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

It turns out a part of this problem is due to the rollout of the new Android Google Play services library. We'll have a fix for this in the next play services library, which when it launches will also roll out automatically.

[Colin Smith]

Thanks for the update Eric. Any idea when the next update will be released? I guess it'll all get sorted out eventually, but it's a bit of a worry that these kind of issues get released at all.

On Monday, September 29, 2014 7:39:36 PM UTC-6, Eric Leichtenschlag wrote:

It turns out a part of this problem is due to the rollout of the new Android Google Play services library. We'll have a fix for this in the next play services library, which when it launches will also roll out automatically. In the meantime, AdMob also has the data to manually recompute the impression counts. So while it may take some time to sort out, these numbers will eventually fill in completely.

On Monday, September 29, 2014 6:26:49 PM UTC-7, Colin Smith wrote:

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

The new version will start rolling out this week.

[Yassine Assafi]

I have the same issue with the interstitial ads without even touching my app, the CTR% has increased dramatically! I hope this isn't dangerous for our accounts as it's a bug from them!

[Agris]

Knowing that Google automates pretty much everything, it can lead to some surprises for developers. Let's hope that it will not happen in this case.

[Colin Smith]

So I can report that today things seem to be back to almost normal. My request vs impression rate has gone back to pretty close to what it was before I reported this issue. I noticed it start to improve yesterday, so I'm guessing the roll-out of the new version of Google Play Services has hit the bulk of my users.