If I am in Turkey and I google “chicken USA”, I should get shown chicken ads from the USA. And when I click, those chicken producers should pay.
I think Google has some knob: point of interest vs physical location somewhere inside UI.
Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
161–170 of 181 posts
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#162Earlier 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…
Yeah, it's funny to see a bunch of people complaining about both ads being ineffective AND conversion tracking being pervasive. But the reality is that unless there's perfect conversion tracking, garbage ads will be inevitable. This is why I have a (very unpopular) opinion of putting precise conversion tracking into the web standard (No, not the garbage one that Apple recently proposed).
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Funny you should mention vouchers - it reminded me of the article discussed here[1], which likened advertising with Google to handing out coupons to people who are already in your store
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 R…
Yes, for near terms its branding. In theory it should make you consider the company when you move to buying stuff stage. But the theory also tells you would need to be exposed to the company with multiple channels. Search counts as one. So it does not work solo.
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#165Earlier 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'm pretty sure fixing bugs that make money is on the very bottom of the list of priorities....
They don't need a bug fix as a stopgap. The fair thing to do would be refund the excess. If I set a limit and they display ads and exceed it, why should it be my problem?
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
No specific tactic works forever. There is no "1 weird trick." You need to set up your advertising and sales funnels to track as prospects become customers, and continually experiment on the message and the channels. This is where most startups start and a lot of them get it wrong. If you have boatloads of VC money, you can run a lot of bad experiments until you hopefully hit paydirt. Paydirt is +ROI ad campaigns on…
So, there are no techniques that work consistently.
Correct, because everything is dynamic, including the search terms, eyeballs, and competition for keywords. It's pretty simple economics - once I find a way to spend $50 to make $100, it's only a matter of time before other people discover something close enough to make me spend $75 to earn $100. Then $90. Then (conjecture), winners curse takes account and people are spending $110 to make $100 (once Neil Patel's audience hears about it).
With the tactics being gobbled up by the Red Queen effect, you have to move to strategies to win. The OP writes about a pretty good one.
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#167Never rely on Google Ads to be honest. They are unlikely to respond at all. After spending ~100k, our ads randomly stopped working last month without changing anything. Support took 10 days to reply saying the account was up for a review (no notifications sent, no indicators). Yet, it still wasn't working. Booked a consultation with one of their so-called "Experts", he couldn't find anything wrong and suggested to co…
Is it possible that your experience is an outlier, and not generalizable as advice?
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#168A 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 basi…
I would try several different approaches in your content. Don't get hung up on what you think is relevant -- what matters is what google thinks is relevant. Since they don't tell you precisely, try a few different variations -- going for maximum diversity, since you're in a search optimization grid like the board game Battleship.
You need to try things that are as different as possible. Don't rewrite it -- explicitly take different approaches with the goal of making them very different from each other. Then run an experiment.
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#169Google 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 am a Google certified premier partner managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in spend a month for Google AdWords... Google ads have become a giant scam over the last few years. Be extremely careful, they are constantly changing things in ways that border on outright fraud. Google used to be a company I respected and loved, I am disappointed to see what's happened recently. It would be great to see someone with integrity step up and set the company back on the right path.
Re: Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lets say it costs $3 to acquire a customer on average. And your margin is $30. That sounds good.
Now do an experiment. Stop your ads.
Do your sales go down 100%? In that cost the $3 cost was definitely justified.
Do your sales go down 50%? That means you actually paid $6 to acquire a customer, not $3. Still sounds like a reasonable deal since you still make $24 profit, but other channels might be more profitable.
Do your sales go down 10%? Then only one in 10 customers actually converted because of the ad, and you are paying $30 to acquire a customer and it would be better to stop the campaign. Google is just showing ads to people that would buy your stuff anyway. (Side note: I think this is a big problem with retargeting. You are paying to show ads to people that are already very likely to buy your stuff -- or even worse, who have bought it already. But conversion rates are really high!)
(To be fair, this is speculation and not based on experience with adwords. My only experience with adwords was a $100 campaign I made a few years back with promotional credit that resulted in no conversions)