71–80 of 434 posts
With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...
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.
You had huge click farms back in the days. Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90% The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product? Or do people real…
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
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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.
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.
In that context: suggest a fairer way.
Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!
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?
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This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg. You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
Yep. And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free" Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy. And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
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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…
Google ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, us…
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.
You had huge click farms back in the days. Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90% The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product? Or do people real…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads
The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways. I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to: - only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for) - only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broa…