Google Served Ads For Products From Other Merchants, Google Will Issue Credits

The big Google Ads reporting outage from the eve of August 1st was an intentional outage due to Google serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts. This was not just an ad spend issue but also a privacy and data issue for Google advertisers.

But don't worry, Google will issue credits to the "small fraction of advertisers" that were impacted by this.

Google later admitted in its Google Ads status dashboard that the reporting outage was intentional. Google updated the dashboard to say, "We temporarily paused access to certain reports on August 1." Why did they intentionally pause reporting? Because you were able to see your competitors product data?

Google wrote, "Starting on July 30, 16:54:38 PST, a small fraction of advertisers started serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts and were able to see those products in their Ads reporting. The serving issue was resolved on July 31, 11:27:35 PST."

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison added on X that Google will credit those advertisers that were impacted. She wrote, "We will be contacting all directly impacted customers with further details on this incident soon, and will be working towards issuing credits in the coming weeks."

We will be contacting all directly impacted customers with further details on this incident soon, and will be working towards issuing credits in the coming weeks.

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) August 2, 2024

Then on August 4th, Google posted this update:

For accounts that have not been affected by this issue, all reporting services have been restored. Thank you for your patience during this time and we apologize for the inconvenience.

For accounts affected by this issue, we are still working to restore reporting services for Report Editor and the Products tab. We will continue to provide further updates as soon as we have more information. We will reach out to all impacted customers directly with further details on this incident.

What a mess Google!

But is it a larger issue than what it was (not that the confirmed issue was not large)? I am not sure:

and @ppcbuyers -- This is due to a bug that led to the Google Display Network label appearing in error in some Demand Gen campaign reporting. I’ll get back to you on this when I have more information.

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) August 5, 2024

Aside from the data security implications, the timing was very bad. These reports were pulled on August 1 while many brands and agencies were trying to compile their monthly reports.

Thankfully, we have third-party tools, like NinjaCat, that warehouse is the data locally. But…

— Menachem Ani - Google Ads 🎯 (@MenachemAni) August 5, 2024

Well, one major issue is that a lot of scripts are also not running due to this.

Think about the Labelizer script, this now directly affects performance.

Can we also get a refund on these? 😅

— Alfred Simon (@AlfredSimon) August 5, 2024

We will be contacting all directly impacted customers with further details on this incident.

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) August 5, 2024

Greg Finn also dove deeper into this on our show yesterday:

A few hours later today, Google posted an update saying:

All reporting services have been restored, with the exception of some competitive metrics. We will provide a final update when those metrics are available for all customers.

We have removed the incorrect data from affected accounts. This issue was caused by an ads serving bug. It did not impact Google Merchant Center accounts and was not related to customer migration to the new Google Merchant Center. Thank you for your patience during this time and we apologize for the inconvenience. We will reach out to all impacted customers directly with further details on this incident in the coming days and will be working towards issuing credits in the coming weeks.

Forum discussion at X.

Update August 8: Note: All reporting was fully restored on August 8th, as noted here. Google wrote, "All reporting services have been restored."

Update: August 19: Google asking advertisers to delete the data:

oh goodness.

Google Ads were showing one advertisers products in another advertisers accounts.

Problem was fixed 3 weeks ago, just getting an email now, and Google is asking the impacted advertiser (who??) to be a good citizen and delete data.

cc: @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/QSl778fSP1

— Ye-ho-SHU-a (phonetic) (@AnalyticsNinja) August 19, 2024