Late last week, Google announced new AdSense performance reports claiming the new is better than the old. But based on a WebmasterWorld thread filled with publishers, publishers are not happy with the new reports.
First, why does Google say this is better? Google says the new reports give you "more control and flexibility" over your reporting. Here are some samples Google provides:
- Easier analysis: Get deeper insights by adding, changing or removing dimensions with the simple, redesigned dimension selector.
- Simple metrics: Better understand your earnings with the redesigned metric families. We've designed metric families to group related reporting metrics and separate the different ways you make money from ads. For instance, the Clicks metric family includes metrics that relate to the CPC bid type.
- Flexible reporting: Configure your filters the way you want. You can now apply multiple filters to your reports with the redesigned multiple filtering. For instance, you can now filter your Ad sizes report by both the country and platform dimension.
But publishers are not happy, they feel Google is hiding data they've grown to count on. Here are some quotes from the thread:
I've had another go and I really do not like it, I cannot find things I want to know like EPCs and click volume, they may be there somewhere however it's not obvious to me, I really do not want to have to waste my time finding out these things when I have better to do. Maybe it's fine for power users who need to present statistics to someone.The killer for me is that it is very slow to load.
Page CTR was eliminated regardless of the new interface. Same goes for the following:Ad CTR Ad request CTR Ad requests Ad RPM Ad request RPM Ad impressions Coverage
After repeated attempts over the past few weeks, I haven't been happy with the new reports so I went back to the older reporting interface. The bottom line is, why make me go to extra trouble and extra clicks to get the information I want, instead of leaving it all on one page?I really really really really wish they'd let us just create our own dashboards and default performance reports so that we could assemble the metrics that are important to US, and not what Google thinks should be important to us. We can (more or less) do this in Analytics with dashboards and shortcuts. Why not AdSense? Actually I have a suspicious why (it's no secret they've been trying to de-emphasize things like the number of clicks, CTR and EPC for a while now) so I am not holding my breath. But I will not be converting to the new reports until I'm dragged in kicking and screaming. (And I've told them this many times. I don't think they care.)
The reports do look prettier. :)
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
