AuctionAds clicks dropped after outage?

I ran AuctionAds for about a week or so before the outage they recently had, and averaged 1000 clicks/day (+/- 100) or so. Ever since I have averaged about ~400/day. It could just be a coincidence but its been steady now for about 3 days and was very steady before.

I haven't changed anything on my site and traffic has been consistent (CTR went from about 1.0% to 0.4%) Has anyone else notice a decrease in CTR since the outage a few days ago?

 

Same here. I was pretty steady at around 10k imps and 160 clicks per day +/- 20%. For the last 3 days it's been 8k imps and 65 clicks. Holding steady, too.

That doesn't look like coincidence. Either the imps and clicks were being overstated before or they are being understated now.

 

hard to tell. Could be a database transaction issue...count table not updating correctly. On the same topic, have you two experienced any sales through the Auction Ads?

 

I've had just a few very small sales. My stats: 150k imps, 2200 clicks, $8 in earnings.

 

I explained this a little bit in another thread. Impressions and clicks are stored in memory and get dumped to disk periodically. If anything happens, that data is lost. The clicks ALWAYS go through, even if the numbers get lost. It doesn't happen very often, but obviously when we're moving servers around its more likely to have to restart a process or something. Since at the end of the day the impression/click numbers are pretty irrelevant, its an acceptable trade-off.

That said we haven't really had an "outage" to speak of. The main site was taken down for a few hours during migration, and there were a couple small sporadic issues, but no outage with ad serving.

 

Auctionads have been down for some time during the last days. Ads didn't load up on websites. That probably affected your stats.

 

CTR is hardly irrelevant. That's how one judges the interest level in the ads being served. We can tweak the keywords to get ads that people will click on and presumably some of those will turn into auctions won. So knowing CTR is very important, which means accurate numbers for impressions and clicks is important.

Aside from that, the trend is quite strange - a consistently higher level of imps and clicks suddenly drops to a consistently lower level. So something is different now than it was before.

 

ddn, it is good to know that even if clicks aren't being counted in your system that our tag is still being passed on so that revenue for the click will still come back to us regardless. Something definitely changed with click counting though when you moved datacenters (either overcounting before or undercounting now), as clicks were very steady before and are now very steady at about 40% of what they used to be (again 1k to 400 so not likely a coincidence).

geomarks clicks dropped by about 60% which is the same as me, which makes me think it was a system wide change. If you would like my account or stats to further look into it please let me know.

 

The only thing that was different was some of the click tracking data was lost for a brief amount of time (1 day at max).

I understand what your saying about using ctr to determine keywords but with auctionads it takes a bit to ramp up (even on a keyword level) so I would highly advise not doing daily changes to your keywords if that is what you are doing.

I can tell you across the board other then that 1 day there has not been a issue with reporting in reguards to click tracking (revenue is always correct)

 

Thanks for the info Shoe. On a completely unrelated topic, and chance of you guys showing the number of auctions won and new ebay members along with the current total revenue stats? Seems like it would be interesting for publishers to see this breakdown.

 

Understand. I don't change keywords once I publish a page on my site. But I do look at what is drawing clicks and when I add a new page I try to choose keywords that are both relevant to the page content and pickup popular auctions. I started doing that after the first week and my CTR jumped. Still waiting for my snowball however.

 

This is on our list of stuff to look into doing. We will are everywhere listening to what users are asking for. Its on the list but many things have much higher priority atm

 

Who knows what Shoemoney has up his sleeves. I'm hoping for some kind of Auction Ads API or Web extender.

 

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