• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 20, 2024

Google reached out to advertisers after its ad platform served one advertiser’s products in another advertiser’s account -- apologizing for the mistake, and also asking them to do something out of the ordinary.

The advertising system experienced significant glitches on a variety of reporting platforms. Now, several weeks later, Google has instructed advertisers to delete any copies of data made if they found incorrect data in accounts.

@AnalyticsNija, an analytics consultant on X, posted comments with a photo of his email, saying “Google is asking the impacted advertiser (who??) to be a good citizen and delete data.”

In the email, Google admitted that due to a system issue, some products in Google Merchant Center accounts were served with another advertiser’s ad. This began on July 30.

Product attributes data such as Merchant Center ID, Brand, Category and Product titles were temporarily unavailable in reporting in that Google Ads account in the Report Editor, Ads Editor and Google Ads API.

Google also said in the letter that no personal identifiable information (PII) or payment information was shared, and assured advertisers that their account was not billed for serving the ads.

From a software perspective, Google engineers are being encouraged to make many more changes very quickly, according to Jim Yu, founder and executive chairman of BrightEdge.

“They are being challenged to move faster than in the past,” he said. “With that many updates it could increase the number of bugs.”

Yu said that even after OpenAI’s launch of SearchGPT, the changes Google made on its AI platform continue to accelerate.

The reporting bug is not the only recent glitch in Google’s system. On Tuesday, Google confirmed it has resolved issues around the search ranking bug that surfaced late last week. The bug was first spotted around the release of the August 2024 core update last week.

"A Google Search ranking bug impacted a large amount of Google Search results in an ongoing issue," Google wrote at the time, adding that it had found the root cause and that "the issue was unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout."

John Mueller, senior search analyst at Google, wrote on LinkedIn that as of Monday, the team was not satisfied with the results and continued to work on solving the problem. He said he did not think there were any visible effects for marketers, and the company would provide an update in two days.