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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

#151

Post by tomaszs »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #138
tomaszs wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually yes. Google wants to have advertisers who spend fixed amount each month without going much into details. They dont care much about anything more

For example keyword targetting gets broader.and broader. If you target.for keyword you want to target it precisely or with synonyms but you want to have control over it. But Google changed it lately to make it harder to narrow down keywords.

The result is you spend budget on bad keywords. And it seems like ok,if i get money from it overall.

But actually not only you loose budget but others too, because they need to bid higher.

They need.to bid higher for keywords you dont care about but they care. For Google its additional money.

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

#152

Post by tomaszs »

jrobn wrote: post #131
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.

And it is best you can do. Essencially Ads should be the last resort and used with extreme care to not waste a dime. And this takes a lots of focus unfortunately.

Keep the budget low, so you wont bother about it, and use money for anything else than Google Ads.

And its not like i am against Google or something. Actually i have a company that runs Google Ads for clients. So i dont have any hidden interest to criticize Google Ads, contrary. But its the truth and its just something i think everyone should be aware of.

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

#153

Post by james_impliu »

I recently created ad campaigns on Twitter/Facebook and Google for our startup. The dark patterns like this were shocking. They really taste of short term metric driven growth that doesn't consider "now I'm paying for clicks that will never convert, I'm going to churn as an account totally".

For example, Adwords defaults into advertising on every device which now includes TVs. This channel would never work for our business (an app that integrates with GitHub), and I'm sure this would work badly for many other businesses. We only found it by digging into the campaign stats once it had launched.

It also strikes me how long the approval takes for new ads - 48 hours. How many advertisers drop off in that time? That feels like a real value add thing to focus on.

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

#154

Post by dhimes »

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've been seeing 80% of clicks as fraud/nonsense/fake/whatever for a decade.

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

#155

Post by mrep »

echelon wrote: post #20
benologist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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…

> I just don't understand how anyone comes to buy things shown in ads.

What is so different about seeing something you are interested in from an ad or from a website you clicked through to yourself?

> Are ads really effective? I don't buy advertised products.

Do you buy many products online at all? If you don't, then they probably won't be useful as you aren't someone who spends much money online for anything. However, there are many people who do. For example, my girlfriend and many other women I know spend tons of money on clothes/shoes/jewelry online and a decent amount of the products they find out about and like come from advertisements.

To give you an example of the scale, I spent over $1,200 dollars online yesterday during black friday on clothes, shoes, and jewelry for her. While I don't know how many of those products got sourced from advertisements, I'm sure some of them were because most were from a doc she has been using to keep track of things she wants and she likely saw them first on an advertisement.

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

#156

Post by dessant »

kaugesaar wrote: post #106
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.

> Oh yes, those baby clicks on YouTube.

A friend's toddler was watching a cartoon with songs on YouTube, and they were deeply focused on it when an ad popped in their face. They didn't stop crying for an hour.

By excluding channels for kids from your ad campaign you can both save money and avoid scaring children, so go for it. :)

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

#157

Post by GordonS »

A bit OT, but does anyone have any advice on improving page relevancy quality scores?

My site is focused only on relevant content in a particular infosec niche, and is well written - yet quality scores across the site are 2-4, and have been for the entire site history, which spans almost 20 years. Which means we pay more for ads.

I've been through the usual guides, and I can't find anything actionable - they all basically boil down to "have relevant content" - but I do, dammit!

I've also taken up Google's frequent offers of free help from an expert on 2 occasions. Both times all they did was try to get me to increase my spend (e.g. enabling the search network etc), and parroted about "writing relevant content", even though both agreed that the content seemed very relevant to them.

The site has been rewritten from scratch a couple of times over the years - no change.

I even paid a copywriter a couple of years back, but the tweaked content still resulted in the same 2-4 quality scores.

I'm considering switching to a different domain, closing the AdWords account and opening a new one, but I've no idea if that would actually change anything.

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

#158

Post by jfoster »

jasonlfunk wrote: post #61
oceliker wrote: post #32

I'm somewhat confused here. I live in the US but regularly visit Turkey to see family (say, once a year). I also regularly Google things related to the US when I'm there. Clicks outside the US are not necessarily meaningless -- the screenshot in the article shows that they are targeting people "regularly in the US". Just because I left for a couple of weeks does not mean I abandoned everything related to where I live…

I’m the opposite. An American living abroad. US targeted ads still are applicable to me. I can understand why someone might want to disable this feature, but it’s not a scam by any means.

> US targeted ads still are applicable to me.

Not necessarily applicable to the advertiser, though. If there's a US restaurant chain hoping for regular customers, they would be wasting their ad spend if you're on the receiving end of the ads.

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

#159

Post by dhimes »

tomaszs wrote: post #152
jrobn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it is best you can do. Essencially Ads should be the last resort and used with extreme care to not waste a dime. And this takes a lots of focus unfortunately. Keep the budget low, so you wont bother about it, and use money for anything else than Google Ads. And its not like i am against Google or something. Actually i have a company that runs Google Ads for clients. So i dont have any hidden interest to criticize…

I think it best to think about the ads in the same way you would in any other medium. Unless you have a special offer or something, it's just branding. The original hypothesis upon which Google was founded, that people would be interested in buying things if they were searching the internet for something relatable, seems to have failed- at least in the near-term sense. Just because I am looking for campsites in the Rockies doesn't mean I am in the market for a sleeping bag. But to put the ad in front of me then to make me aware of your brand might be useful. That's the game played by advertisers since they began with media advertising.

Given this, all of the data collection/tracking/etc. seems like a round-off error in effectiveness, and doesn't seem to be worth the loss of individual privacy.

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

#160

Post by riku_iki »

buboard wrote: post #101
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?

Minimum modifier is -90%, so you only can penalize mobile.
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