Well, with the latest round of maintenance this weekend there was the ubiquitous griping that Google uses these days to steal our money and I'm getting pretty tired of seeing that pop up every time Google does down. So, I decided to do some investigating and see what I could determine. Maintenance is invariably on Saturday. Thus we should see Saturdays as being low earning days. I calculated various statistics for each day of the week for the last nine months from my site. Earnings probably wouldn't be a good indicator of cheating but we'll look at it as well. Why wouldn't it be as good an indicator? Well, because we've all see how much clicks vary even intra-day. But, I considered it and also looked at number of clicks, since if Google were cheating us, the number of clicks would be what is not counted. What did I find? Saturdays are my fourth highest earning day and my third highest as far as number of clicks are concerned. For earnings, Saturdays were 0.46 Standard Deviations BELOW the mean and for clicks 0.39 Standard Deviations ABOVE the mean. For any significance to be associated with average Saturday values, I wouldn't even consider anything hokey going on unless I was seeing 1.5 or 2 Standard Deviations below. For clicks, my worst day is Friday and for earnings, my worst day is Wednesday (calculated over the last nine months). Best day for clicks is Sunday and best day for earnings is Sunday and Monday, with the Sunday clicks being the only one with a high Standard Deviation (and even that isn't too out of line) In conclusion. If you feel Google is cheating you, I suggest looking at your data in greater detail and applying some simple statistical checks. When you do, you will likely find everything is normal.
That's a lot of good info. You really took an emotionless approach to trying to figure this out. My saturdays have always been lower, I think it's because people in my niche are not online as much on the weekend (I do get fewer visitors on the weekend). So your data won't necessarily correlate with others, but I agree with you. Google wouldn't do this, it would set them up for a class action lawsuit and ruin their image.
I think the issue may be late updating on Saturdays after maintenance. After the maintenance is over, and we see the first stats for the day, they look like they are screwed up. But I have found that I had to wait a number of hours for the stats to update completely. Then they look fine. I think that some folks are jumping to conclusions by just looking at the "first" stats they see after maintenance. It is best to look again at the end of the day. FWIW, Saturdays have always been my lowest paying days, followed by Sundays. But the last two weekends, my results have been much better, for some reason.
I agree completely. When I first looked at the stats this Saturday when the site came back up, they were almost exactly where they were the last time I checked _before_ the maintenance. I wasn't worried. I checked again a bit later and there was a significant jump up. I checked back a bit later still and there was another significant upward jump. These were Earnings/Clicks/Impression jumps that I NEVER see during a normal day (but often see on Maintenance Days)...it is just the databases catching up.
Nah. We don't get cheated. Statistics come back. Just a few days ago I thought we were all getting cheated. Lol I ragged on AdSense - Google so hard for no reason. Sorry guys.