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

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

#121

Post by jakobegger »

mattlondon wrote: post #117
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…

They are hugely effective. Even if only a small percentage (e.g. People are making huge amounts of money/doing huge amounts of business directly as a result of the ads, and that is not just Google and Facebook, but everyone all the way down to little mom and pop businesses. When you track things down to the level of sales it very often works (not always - depends on products/business models etc), and that is why peop…

The problem with this kind of accounting is that it doesn't consider whether the ad was really necessary to make a sale in the first place.

With a lot of brand keyword advertising, companies are paying for people to click an ad when they were already looking for your website anyway. So spending $3 on that customer is not a $27 profit but rather a $3 loss....

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

#122

Post by 2sk21 »

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…

Given their monopoly power, this is beginning to sound increasingly like a tax on businesses.

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

#123

Post by kaugesaar »

tiborsaas wrote: post #114
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…

> if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification? Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my…

I wouldn't use the word likely. It might be because of who your target group is etc and I therefore have another experience. But yes, it does happen. The way it works is that Google allow themself to spend up to 2x your daily budget. If they exceed your daily x2, you'll be credited any overcharged amount.

Eg. Your daily budget is $200 and they spend $420, you’ll get a $20 credit.

Then there is the monthly limit, which is your daily budget x 30.4. Also here you'll be credited any amount they exceed.

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

#124

Post by tomaszs »

tiborsaas wrote: post #114
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…

> if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification? Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my…

Google explains that on the long run, like,30 daya of campaign, it will be proper on average. The explanationis, that Google will spend more when it sees possibilities to give more value in specific time. For example, there is a special day when people buy more than usual, but later they dont. So there is more budget spend on this special day, and less on others to make it even.

So there is a reason behind it. But its something well hidden. You have 500 dollars for a one week campaign, and it occurs you pay 1000 dollars for it. It does not seem to be right.

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

#125

Post by danpalmer »

kchamplewski wrote: post #116
tiborsaas wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day. How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification? Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my…

As I understand it the reasoning given tends to be that ad auctions happen extremely quickly, and therefore too quickly to check some single source of truth for your current budget. Therefore, the budget is only "eventually consistent" - i.e. at the end of the campaign or after a day or so, the number you're being charged is accurate. However during the campaign itself it's not possible to guarantee that things won't…

I suspect a factor that makes this trickier is cost per click. You're bidding for a click not a particular spend, so if your cost per click is ~$0.01 then overrunning by 100 clicks only costs $1 over budget. If you're more like $1-5 a click (not uncommon) then you can easily get to $100 over budget.

My guess is that this is worse the lower your budget, and $100 a day is a low budget for Google ads when you're considering the whole industry.

I would expect that with a budget of, say, $5000 a day, you might still be ~$100 out.

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

#126

Post by nl »

jakobegger wrote: post #121
mattlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are hugely effective. Even if only a small percentage (e.g. People are making huge amounts of money/doing huge amounts of business directly as a result of the ads, and that is not just Google and Facebook, but everyone all the way down to little mom and pop businesses. When you track things down to the level of sales it very often works (not always - depends on products/business models etc), and that is why peop…

The problem with this kind of accounting is that it doesn't consider whether the ad was really necessary to make a sale in the first place. With a lot of brand keyword advertising, companies are paying for people to click an ad when they were already looking for your website anyway. So spending $3 on that customer is not a $27 profit but rather a $3 loss....

While buying your product name (or your competitor) is sometimes the case, this isn't the main source of volume in your pipeline.

And it's still a $27 profit, even if it is possible you could have saved money.

Most of the time a well-optimised PPC pipe looks for specific (non-brand) keywords and buys them, not just the product name.

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

#127

Post by nl »

pas wrote: post #109
puranjay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) :/

There's no obvious network effect in search.

Google does have brand and distribution though.

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

#128

Post by nl »

pas wrote: post #111
ifdefdebug wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about just not serving the ad to an IP in Turkey without even looking at the person using it?

How reliable is IP geolocating nowadays?

It's pretty reliable outside some known bad blocks.

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

#129

Post by stevespang »

"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."

This is the EXACT reason years ago I only gave Google multiple prepaid credit cards over the years with a $200 limit because I KNEW they couldn't be trusted. When they started notifying me they would not accept prepaids anymore I abandoned my ad word account - - and fortunately my rank is the same as it was on 1st page since I'm in a nitch business

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

#130

Post by treebornfrog »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #71
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.

Replace 'Google' with any other large digital advertising platform and your comment would still make sense. I've seen funded dating startup from US, which released their ad campaign on Facebook targeting 'Worldwide' for maximum clicks (thinking the clicks would be distributed), 90% of their users were from Philippines and they had to eventually change their product to Philippines only (no offence to Philippines, it's…

Then the marketing person lacks fundamental understanding of the platform.

Also, how do you spend so much cash and ignore the stats for so long that you have to change the target demographic for the app?

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