Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US • Hacker News Board

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#101

Post by buboard » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

tomaszs wrote: post #94

Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…

> And Google removed an option to disable mobile apps altogether lately.

can you adjust bid to -100% for mobile?

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#102

Post by buboard » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

benologist wrote: post #15

tehwebguy wrote: post #6

Google bundles bad clicks like a pile of stinking, rotten subprime mortgages and then peppers them with some good clicks and sells them to you like JP Morgan in 2005. Did you read the fine print? Doesn’t matter, you can’t redline it anyway so it’s take it or leave it.

Their whole ad empire is desperate for a massive audit. Google had to be sued to deliver a $400,000 refund they owed but later claimed couldn't be delivered, claiming 3rd parties had been paid the funds when it was their own platforms. It turned out Google had accidentally kept $75 million. https://marketingland.com/class-action-lawsuit-accuses-googl...

google is just taking advantage of the old "Half of my ad money is wasted". They sell pretty dashboards to advertisers so they can pretend they 're working , and have a huge network effect among agencies now. very tough for a newcomer to find a crack

without competition, it's only going to get worse

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#103

Post by artur_makly » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 10:41 AM UTC

tomaszs wrote: post #94

Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…

I can personally confirm another f'd up Google Display Ad scheme... When looking at the list of mostly gambling sites that their almighty algo decided we would have most success in for a niche UX platform!

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#104

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 10:42 AM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #78

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my surprise yes ads are very effective. Without getting too specific, my close relatives run their own business as home improvement contractors. In the early days, before they had their reputation built, I setup a google adwords campaign for them — having never run an ad campaign before. It was a simple PPC campaign that included keywords in google search results and geofenced it to the SFBay. Here are some number…

That's not exactly a shining endorsement... "Yeah, Google was robbing us blind and kind of scamming us with their geofencing shenanigans, but we were making enough money that it wasn't worth fighting, and eventually we figured out how to stop buying ads from them."

And I think that's exactly how adtech works, both internally and externally. Everyone is scamming everyone else with fudged and pretty opaque statistics, but there's enough ROI at the bottom that the whole thing hasn't collapsed yet.

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#105

Post by muro » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #85

ohazi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly a shining endorsement... "Yeah, Google was robbing us blind and kind of scamming us with their geofencing shenanigans, but we were making enough money that it wasn't worth fighting, and eventually we figured out how to stop buying ads from them."

I don't think it was supposed to be an endorsement.

If I could pay just 70$ per customer bringing in 1000+$, I would spend all I could and borrow heavily to run those ads. From a business perspective, it's a great endorsement.

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#106

Post by kaugesaar » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 10:59 AM UTC

tomaszs wrote: post #94

Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out. For example if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by video clicks made by ba…

Oh yes, those baby clicks on YouTube. Annyoing as hell. Stay away from broad affinity / in-market groups or you'll end up spending 20%-40% of your budget on channels for toddlers.

By time though you'll build up a nice list that you can exclude, but it's going to cost you in the start.

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#107

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 11:11 AM UTC

cookie_monsta wrote: post #56

echelon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has adblocked everything since my teenage years, the whole ad industry seems to be making orders of magnitude more money than it should. I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads. Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products. Do we really trust ad tech accounting? They've been caught inflating numbers over and over again. The whole house of cards seems like it cou…

The old saw was that 50% of advertising is useless, it's just that nobody knows which 50%. I guess that's why people are so excited about click tracking, analytics, etc, etc.

I think it's more like 99%.

When I was running advertising for a small business we put vouchers in to track advertising. The only people who brought in vouchers were people who were already customers who said they were already coming. So, we spent money to reduce our revenue. (I do the same, hunt for vouchers after making a buying/visiting decision.)

I was on national TV and national radio (UK) - none of that blipped our visitors/revenue.

Only thing that ever definitely worked was handing out flyers and chatting to people in the street (and being top of Google SERPs).

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#108

Post by pas » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

HereBeBeasties wrote: post #95

temp20160423 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) How do we know these clicks are bad? A sample size of 3 is pretty early to make any conclusions. b) If clicks are not delivering value, advertisers should lower their bids. As Google encourages advertisers to switch to bids set on hitting ROI targets, what really matters to advertisers is that they achieve their targets. If the clicks are "bad" and conversion rates are poor, then bids will be adjusted down, presum…

Define "sustainable". Seems like it encourages companies to get in a bidding war against each other in a race to zero profit margins, while Google pockets what could have been their revenue.

Profit is already in the ROI target.

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#109

Post by pas » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 11:30 AM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #79

tehwebguy wrote: post #6

Google bundles bad clicks like a pile of stinking, rotten subprime mortgages and then peppers them with some good clicks and sells them to you like JP Morgan in 2005. Did you read the fine print? Doesn’t matter, you can’t redline it anyway so it’s take it or leave it.

And good luck if you want to try and resolve a problem. There is no customer service to speak of. I really wish there was a competitor to Google. They're one of the most opaque organizations around as far as their primary revenue stream - AdSense - is concerned.

Barriers to entry (network effects) :/

Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

#110

Post by emn13 » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 11:35 AM UTC

I mean, this all sounds sort of like a reasonable complaint... until you get to the sample size: 3 clicks.

It appears arguably reasonable that geotargeting isn't exact, nor is it clear that these clicks weren't actually real and valuable. If he's trying to make the point that the trend is disturbing, well, then: make that point with something akin to a real sample (at least 1000 clicks, spread over more than a week?)