Publisher Questions: Why don’t actions show up immediately?
June 29th, 2010 by Tim WintleAs a publisher, you may sometimes wonder why your actions can take a while to show up on your dashboard.
In the interest of transparency I’ll explain how our stats systems work from a high-level, and why your payments aren’t affected by system maintenance.
When designing our ad-serving and tracking systems, our top priorities are generally:
- Accurately recording the number of actions
- Serving ads onto your page quickly
- Ensuring fraudulent publishers can’t abuse our systems to take money they don’t deserve from our advertisers.
Detecting invalid actions (of which fraud is only a small minority) is not a simple task – and it can take a significant amount of computing power to analyse the volume of actions we receive.
If we attempted to categorise and analyse all actions as soon as they occurred[*] then we would struggle to serve ads (and record actions) on your websites during traffic spikes.
To avoid this (and to ensure the ad network can carry on serving during maintenance and updates), we separate our systems into (constantly running) high performance ad serving and action tracking systems (which simply record preliminary data) and systems which perform analysis of this data.
The analysis systems periodically analyse the preliminary data and use as much computing power as they have available to update our main databases. If there is not enough computing power available (or if we are in the middle of scheduled maintenance) then the analysis will wait until a later time before updating the databases.
I hope this high-level description has helped explain the delay between actions occurring and being displayed in your dashboards – and why our dashboard updates don’t affect your monthly payments.
Tim Wintle
[*] – it’s worth noting it would technically be impossible to fully analyse actions immediately – some analysis can only be done in bulk, after your actions are recorded.
