A heads up to all e-Commerce accounts out there that your November AdWords data might not be accurate. Google sent an email out earlier this afternoon to say that conversion values were not tracking correctly during the period of Nov 20th at 6:30 PM PST to Nov 21st at 8:00 PM PST.

Who is affected?

  • Anyone using “conversion value” as a key metric for reports, or automated rules – typically e-Commerce clients. This is not removing conversions, but changing values of those conversions to “1.”
  • We’re not sure yet if this issue was for all AdWords accounts or isolated to a particular section. We’ll update this as we learn more.

Who shouldn’t worry about this?

  • Non revenue generating accounts (i.e. lead generation)
  • Accounts that use other sources for revenue tracking such as Analytics or third party tools.

What should you do?

  • If you do have automated rules running, make sure they aren’t bidding things down – particularly with Black Friday / Cyber Monday approaching.
  • Make sure to make any adjustments in your reports.

Here’s the full message that was emailed out:

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We’re writing to let you know about a temporary technical issue that affected conversion tracking data in your account (xxx-xxx-xxxx). We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Here are the details.

From November 20th approximately 6:30 p.m. PST through November 21st approximately 8:00 p.m. PST, AdWords was incorrectly recording a conversion value of 1 when a conversion occurred.

This means AdWords reports which include any dates from October 21st through November 21st might misstate the value of your conversions. (If you’ve customized your conversion reporting window, the precise date range will be different). Related metrics like average conversion value and conversion value / cost might also be affected. Conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion metrics, however, would not be affected.

Again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you. Systems reliability is a top priority for us, so our engineering team is conducting a thorough review to help avoid any similar issues in the future.

Please contact Adwords support (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/8206) or your Google representative if you have additional questions, or would like to discuss how best to work around the missing data.

Sincerely,

The AdWords Team