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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

#131

Post by jrobn »

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…

So why even use a platform that so easily throws your money away for nothing? With those points you laid out I would be better off keeping my money.

Facebook is the same way with all of this crap too. I’ve seen more success with the hard way, networking and getting content made about me and distributed in magazines or online blogs from people who get to use my service for free.

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

#132

Post by felipemnoa »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #104
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."

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.

So what you are saying is that all that is needed is for a newcomer to come and do things a little bit better and it will eat everybody's lunch. Just like google did to search engines when they started.

Sounds like a great business opportunity.

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

#133

Post by brigandish »

ijidak wrote: post #30
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…

Yes. As an advertiser, who traces each ad, I can say that advertising has demonstrably made me thousands upon thousands of dollars. However, 80% of ads are trash peddled by blind men leading blind men. There are very specific advertising techniques that work consistently, but most "marketing types" optimize for flashy artistic ads that have literally ZERO selling power. In fact, in some studies, ads actually REDUCE s…

I'm not in the industry so please forgive my ignorance, but what is ad tracing? Is it the same as ad tracking, if it is then I really don't understand as there seems to be a huge amount of tracking going on!

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

#134

Post by legulere »

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…

That actually sounds like ads helped them find a market, they didn’t come up with themselves.

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

#135

Post by TeMPOraL »

felipemnoa wrote: post #132
TeMPOraL wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what you are saying is that all that is needed is for a newcomer to come and do things a little bit better and it will eat everybody's lunch. Just like google did to search engines when they started. Sounds like a great business opportunity.

The core innovation that would be needed here is providing such good transparency and attribution that such newcomer could turn around and prove that all their competitors are scamming their customers. Without that, fudging numbers will prevail simply because it can make money without having to do as much work.

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

#136

Post by buboard »

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…

a fine example of making lemonade

imagine if they said "lets pay double as much to try to target US users"

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

#137

Post by heavenlyblue »

danpalmer wrote: post #125
kchamplewski wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conside…

No. They overshoot because there’s a small-letter asterisk within the budged definition that allows then to overshoot at twice the amount.

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

#138

Post by heavenlyblue »

tomaszs wrote: post #124
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…

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 it…

There is no reason to that aside from Google making more money. They are not your friend.

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

#139

Post by spunker540 »

treebornfrog wrote: post #112
anchpop wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but my girlfriend clicks on ads on instagram and buys things directly from there on a regular basis. I think the people who go on HN might be in a little bit of a bubble about the efficacy of advertisements.

HN is a bubble. I've been running PPC ads for highly targeted keywords for the last 5 years which have generated a ridiculous return. In general ppc is steady and reliable once you have you're keywords and ads running for a while and are well optimized. On the other hand, I've recently been trying dropshipping, advertising the product on Facebook. I did a small test for a unique product, I sourced it from China for a…

Why haven’t you scaled out the dropshipping concept further? It sounds pretty solid.

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

#140

Post by shantly »

nl wrote: post #127
pas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barriers to entry (network effects) :/

There's no obvious network effect in search. Google does have brand and distribution though.

On targeted advertising the barrier is that you must already have a significant fraction of the personal data Google has before you can start to compete.
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