Inaccurate View Through Conversion Reporting In AdWords
This is something that puzzled me for a while. This AdWords account only had a single Search campaign in it and had never been opted in to the Display Network.
I contacted AdWords support and they confirmed that I wasn’t going mad, and it was a technical problem :-
“You are absolutely correct – this campaign has had no Display/Video ads at all. The conversions we saw (view through conversions) were inaccurate data being reported in the AdWords for Search campaigns like the one in your account due to a technical error at our system’s end. This inaccurate data go back as far as 30 days from November 2nd. So, if you set the date range from Nov 3 – till today (any time after November 3), you will see zero view through conversions as a result of this error being fixed by our engineering team.”
So if you find view through conversions valuable on any of your campaigns, it’s probably worth contacting support to see how much they have been over-reported by in the 30 days prior to November 3rd 2016.
Also – it does make me more than slightly uneasy about what other reporting problems may have occurred in the past that I wasn’t informed about… :-(