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New AdSense Interface Causing Lots of Problems & Issues

Google AdSense updated their reporting interface today for the first time in years.  It looks sleek, uncluttered and a very minimalist version of the old interface.  If you don’t have it updated in your account, AdSense is rolling it out to all publishers over the next few days.  For those who are in the dark, here is how the new look appears.

However, since the new UI launch, my inbox has lit up with plenty of complaints about the new UI.

Many AdSense publishers access their accounts via mobile phones, which isn’t too surprising in this day and age.  Unfortunately, the AdSense team failed to take into account this very major usability aspect into consideration.  So now those attempting to access their earnings and reports discover that the new AdSense UI essentially breaks when viewing on a mobile phone when they switch from the “Mobile View” with limited information to the “Classic View” with more detailed reporting information.  Mobile version does display basic information, and does load cleanly and quickly, but for power AdSense publishers, it is the more detailed information that they really need to access.

What phones aren’t working?  Reports include iPhones, Blackberry phones as well as (funnily enough) Samsung 3S running Android.  There are probably more, since the update is still rolling out, but it is the iPhone that has everyone up in arms with comments about whether it could be intended or not due to it being a competitor to Google’s Android.  Some people are reporting a better mobile experience, athough no one specified what mobile phone/platform they were on, of it they attempted to get more detailed information from the “Classic View” versus the “Mobile View”.

Meg Geddes (@netmeg) left a comment on the AdSense Google+ page about the issues she is having:

Now that it doesn’t render on my iPhone, it’s entirely useless. Was that intentional or just a happy coincidence?  Not only that, because I previously viewed it in Classic view, there’s no clear way to even GET to the mobile view.  I finally managed to manipulate it (via going back and forth in portrait and landscape mode) to click on the mobile view, and all I get now is a message that says “The authentication with the AdSense API failed” with a click to reload that gives me the same error.  You people need to actually TEST this stuff before you release it

They have also changed how reporting is ordered in the UI as well.

Also, when visiting the “Performance reports” tab, you’ll notice that your reports are now organized by type. Click ‘Common reports’ to access your standard reports, and then use the new date range selector. You’ll still be able to choose to either see your default report or daily account performance, just as before.

There is also a second problem with the new UI.  Those publishers who access their accounts in another language have most of their new interface displaying in English.  For those who know both languages, or remember what stats look like, it is easy to figure out.  But for those who do not know English well, this is a major stumbling block.

On the positive side, the AdSense team is aware of the English / non-English issue and are working on it.

Details: We’re currently experiencing problems with non-English versions of the AdSense interface. In these other languages, the majority of content is being displayed in English. However, this has no effect on ad serving or reporting. Our engineers are working on fixing this problem as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.

No word on when “as soon as possible” will be unfortunately.

If you are having problems viewing the AdSense with your mobile, please comment with the phone, OS and whether you tried Classic View or Mobile View.

Remember the woman who sued Google when they suspended her for clicking her own ads?

JenSense suffered a database failure, and one of the side effects was the database ate dozens of posts. While I was restoring some of the corrupted posts (thank you Google Webmaster Tools for showing the 404s and archive.org for all the content of those blog posts) I was reminded of the case of Theresa B. Bradley, who clicked on her own AdSense ads, had her 9-day-old AdSense account suspended, and then sued Google for $250,000 over it.

You can read the whole original post here and the follow-up one that went more in depth on her claims.

The whole lawsuit was pretty bizarre – she claimed it took her staff 100 hours to implement and review ads on her 30-ish page site; she admitted she clicked her own ads to make sure they didn’t sell competing products; that Google damaged her reputation; that Google deleted all her Gmail emails about her AdSense account suspension. And this lawsuit was filed by someone with a history of filing a lot of lawsuits.

The case worked its way through the courts for six months, until Theresa Bradley filed to dismiss the case against Google after she was denied the opportunity to appear via telephone in the court case. And the case was dismissed on February 15, 2007. This filing has some interesting information about the AdSense program for AdSense buffs.

You can read the full case file here which shows all the filings by both Google and Theresa Bradley as the case progressed in court.

How newspapers are earning money from ads visitors cannot click & sabotaging their CPM rates too

My local newspaper, the Victoria Times Colonist (and a second newspaper owned by parent company Postmedia News, the Montreal Gazette) decided to go with a paid subscription model a week ago – once you have read ten articles per month, you can only view the homepage for free.  And while there are some paid subscription model newspapers out there, most of them would load the first sentence or X number of words of the article and then entice you to click a link to purchase a subscription or pass to continue reading.

But the Times Colonist did something different.  It loads the entire webpage – including all the Doubleclick CPM ads as well as Google AdSense ads, before it throws up a layer over top of the page that darkens the page and has a box with their subscription options.  Now, while the Times Colonist – and their parent company Postmedia Network Inc – want to promote subscriptions, they are also ensuring they keep all the advertising revenue for those pages that we can’t actually read nor click on any of the ads.

The big problem with this is that many of those ads are being displayed on TimesColonist.com on a CPM basis through DoubleClick.  Which means that those advertisers are paying for those ads every single time they are viewed.  But once a visitor has hit the 10 page monthly limit (which didn’t reset for me at the start of this month for some reason), those ads still load but become unclickable.  So even if someone is genuinely interested in one of those advertisements, the subscription blocker means that even though the advertiser has paid the news site for their ad to be on that page view, none of the visitors can actually click it. And their behavioral targeting is a little off – that is a Manscape Spa, apparently a spa for men, in the top leaderboard… I would have clicked that just to see what on earth it was!  But alas, Times Colonist didn’t want me to click it, and no, I didn’t try and find the site after.

Along with the ads served through DoubleClick, there are also Google AdSense ads, through Google’s premium publishers.  Now, not all Google AdSense ads are CPM, some of them are EPC ads, so the advertiser doesn’t have to actually pay for those ads unless someone clicks on one.  But suddenly no one can click them, which causes a few problems.

The first is a biggie.  Even brand new AdSense publishers know the cardinal rules of AdSense – don’t click your own ads, don’t do anything gimmicky to draw attention to your ads (oh the good old days of animated arrows and icons next to each ad) and don’t cover your AdSense ads with anything, such as a drop down menu, slidey anything or in this case, a pop up window that blocks the entire page.  In fact, AdSense doesn’t allow any pop-ups at all, pop-u