On December 9, 2022, in the midst of peak ad spending, Google’s GAM had a worldwide outage. AdExchanger reported that publishers saw their served impressions and revenue through GAM drop to zero for roughly three hours. In the current landscape that already presents plenty of challenges for publishers of all sizes, this outage brought an entirely new level of panic.
Adapex to the Rescue
Fortunately, Adapex’s technology suite was able to keep the ad-serving lights on for our partners, all throughout the outage. This allowed our clients to continue to serve ads, and continue to earn revenue. Our team sprang into action, ensuring the “emergency” backup features were working and performing as expected.
Thanks to a special feature in Merlin™, our header bidder wrapper, ad serving continued. Therefore, monetization continued as usual, in near full force. It was not 100% monetization, because without GAM some minor features were not firing, but we did continue to monetize to 90+% potential.
Here you can see how prebid continued to deliver during the hours of the outage. According to GAM, there was no delivery in the hours affected by the bug. Yet, in fact, monetization continued and the prebid delivered more, picking up the slack that GAM left behind.
In the below graph you can see the gap in what our internal analytics tool, Matrix™ reported compared to what was reported in GAM. Matrix™ crawls data directly from the demand partners’ dashboards and it shows higher numbers than GAM – and this is the actual revenue our publishers will receive.
Google’s Response
Google issued a response acknowledging “a technical issue on December 9th, 12:08 am – 3:40 am UTC that impacted ad serving of all line items and programmatic transaction types.”
They explained that while making improvements to the ad-serving infrastructure, a bug was inadvertently introduced, impacting GAM’s ability to process ad requests and serve ads. They were able to detect this issue and fully resolve it a few hours later.
What Does This Mean?
Amidst every challenge rises opportunity. And while these technical malfunctions from Google are rare, it shows why it’s important to diversify and optimize monetization strategies on page. Additionally, it’s an opportunity to assess site performance strategies and how ads affect user experience and revenue.
- Check your header bidder technology
- Start with a prebid wrapper
- Add sophisticated, custom features like fallback
- Comprehensive analytics and reporting dashboard
- Get technical support and expert insight
- Hands-on partner with programmatic expertise and strategic insight
- Ongoing site analysis and optimizations to drive revenue and improve site performance
- Actionable recommendations on page setup and ad units
- Technical support and simple implementation
- Work with a Google Certified Partner
- GAM is an essential part of your monetization strategy
- Trusted partners (like Adapex) get custom training and exclusive access to Google products
- Up to date on new features and releases
Adapex is always here to help. We work closely with our publishers and content producers to streamline and optimize their monetization. We also partner with industry leaders and innovators like Prebid and Google to ensure we have the most up-to-date products on the market. And an adops team that knows how to put it all together to drive revenue for your business. In a world of complex technologies, outages will happen. At Adapex we work to stay ahead of the unpredictable so our clients are never left in the dark. Let us put our technology and team to work for you in 2023.
