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I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

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Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#41

Post by carlosjobim »

aetherspawn wrote: post #32
carlosjobim wrote: post #19

Digital marketing is a solved problem. You pay a commission on verified real sales to affiliates, and they can do what the hell they please to make those sales. If somebody like Google or Meta cannot promise X amount of sales for Y amount of ad money spent, then you are a fool to give them any money. They have all the algorithms and profiles on everybody, so it's their job to match your product to customers. Why shou…

You kind of said everything but nothing all at once. If not Google then where?

Depends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads.

But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#42

Post by r_lee »

wilbo wrote: post #27
Sayrus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application. In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the c…

I'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean: Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.

yes,

in short, people/entities with websites employ bots to click and interact with the Google Ads on their website to generate fake ad revenue.

and the person running the ad campaign is billed for those fake interactions.

I'm guessing app ads are heavily botted because they're more costly vs. a simple ad that lands you on a website (edit: I was wrong, see reply by OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665323)

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#44

Post by Barbing »

sergiotapia wrote: post #18

How much of Google's revenue is just scams? Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link. Fugazi!

Otherwise their competitor gets top billing for their very own brand name. See this on Apple’s App Store too. Feels very unfair.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#45

Post by n0us »

harry8 wrote: post #36
phenomen wrote: post #8

If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/ After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.

Why can’t Google do this? Surely their data is better than yours. They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?

Taking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road.

Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#46

Post by compiler-guy »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #34

Who would waste their time running a bot farm just to click ads? Almost sounds like Google are paying these farms

People who own the click farms who get paid to run the ads when they are clicked on.

This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#47

Post by taylorfinley »

nickabe wrote: post #15
blitzar wrote: post #6

When you are talking to your VC, they are just "installs"

I guess that's the nice thing about not having a VC... there's no advantage to spinning to anything other than fraud lol.

Hey, I need to add that to my list of reasons to build without vc [0]

[0] https://novc.fyi/why

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#48

Post by rybosworld »

I've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common.

And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#49

Post by PunchyHamster »

compiler-guy wrote: post #46
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #34

Who would waste their time running a bot farm just to click ads? Almost sounds like Google are paying these farms

People who own the click farms who get paid to run the ads when they are clicked on. This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.

Ok but normally, the ads are on site, site owner pays click farms to click the ads, he earns on the difference between ad revenue and click cost.

How does that work for an app that's just some game ?

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#50

Post by rybosworld »

carlosjobim wrote: post #41
aetherspawn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kind of said everything but nothing all at once. If not Google then where?

Depends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads. But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.

SEO is not nearly as effective as it used to be. Organic click through rates have been trending way down since AI responses were added to the top of the search results. So this really isn't just a case of "you're holding it wrong".
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