Seeking Help Popads[dot]net shows thousands of impressions but no traffic on website

[EternityLord]

Hey everyone!

I'm facing a peculiar issue with Popads[dot]net as an advertiser and I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced the same problem. Here's the situation:

For the past six months, I've been successfully using Popads[dot]net to drive good traffic to my website. However, from last 7 days , I noticed a sudden drop in traffic. Interestingly, Popads[dot]net still shows thousands of impressions, indicating that the ads are being served.

To add to the mystery, my URL shortener isn't registering any clicks either. It's as if the traffic is simply not reaching my site, despite the impressions being counted by Popads[dot]net.

It's seems like an Ad Network wide issues as my friends are also getting the same issue. If anyone has encountered a similar situation or has any insights or suggestions on what could be causing this issue, please share your thoughts! I'm eager to figure out what might be going wrong .
Thanks a lot in advance

 

[Graybeard]

1. Have you tested the link in your browser manually through the shortener? Is that working?
Have you verified that shortener link in the ad network dashboard --is it unchanged?

Stop using the URL shortener and link the network link pop ups direct from your website

To add to the mystery, my URL shortener isn't registering any clicks either. It's as if the traffic is simply not reaching my site

The obvious choke point is the link shortener. It could be an intermittent problem with that server only.

Have you checked (monitored) the availability of you domain and server?

Ad Network wide issues as my friends are also getting the same issue.

2. Are they (Friends) also using the same shortener and/or the same ad network as you the same host server or datacenter?

AWS has has some availability problems this week --they reported them resolved.

Amazon cloud services back up after big outage hits thousands of users

Amazon.com said cloud services offered by its unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), were restored after a big disruption on Tuesday affected websites of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Boston Globe among others.

www.reuters.com

 

[EternityLord]

1. I have manually tested the links in my browser, and everything seems to be working fine.
Moreover I have used a URL shortener links only for troubleshooting problem on a single campaign. Other campaigns have direct URLs to my domains.

I have also checked the availability of my domain and server, and everything seems fine. Other Ad networks are sending traffic without any issues.

2. As for my friends, everyone is using different domain names, URLs, with different hosting servers in their campaigns.

 

[EternityLord]

Hi, we also tried tracing the server logs to see if there is any traffic or pings coming from popads traffic, but there is no activity in the server access logs.

 

[Graybeard]

Is the source of your traffic count Google-Analytics?

1. GA may not be counting some of the bounce traffic --that could be non-human or 1 second bounces.
2. The traffic never arrived at your server (where the pop is).

You need to parse your webserver log to verify this. ssh to the location that is the logging path in the domain (or virtual) webserver file

Do you know the path?
default locations are /var/log/nginx or /var/log/apache2 (on a LINUX) server)
if the access logs are not there for that domain

You can identify the traffic search pattern by the tokens used (hopefully) like campaign and the logs date range that is selected in your GA and compare different periods prior to the problem /during the issue (now).

When it comes to troubleshooting analysis: Tools are for fools ...

If you can find the log line that is the popunder; paste the line and I'll write a search pattern count you can use.

 

[EternityLord]

Yup. In Server access log there is lots of request coming from bots and other IP's but there is no traffic coming from countries that I have the targeted in Popads[dot]net. I have checked the pattern but there is no matching result.

 

[EternityLord]

I had escalated this matter with PopAds founder, Tomasz .He Resolved the issue and refunded all the money.

 

[Graybeard]

Take it up with the popads people ...

but there is no activity in the server access logs.

access logs are never empty if the server is working properly, Robots and scrapers make requests all of the time --even if they get a 403.
you need to search grep a pattern like the campaign id [token]. popcash is redirected traffic most of it not from their domain.