Sorry, I am new here, but who funds that bot farm? i don't get it
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
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.
>also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
My understanding of it so far is that it is at most, 50 or 100 houses as a test... It's a startup that wants to make it wide scale but hasn't got there yet.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
idk, i’ve spent six figures on meta ads in the last few months and gotten tons of real users for my app. how is that a con?
How has been the return? 6 figs is a lot if your users aren't earning you that money back.
I dabbled with this 10-15 years ago.
I always ignore all numbers on the dashboard. All I care about is how much I paid, and how much revenue went up in following weeks.
I never could quite get that number positive.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#94At this point you have to just factor bots into your marketing costs. You have to go by overall cost per acquisition not cost per click.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#95If 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?
Admitting in public how bad the bot and fraud problem would be, metaphorically speaking, shooting their primary revenue source in the dick.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#96Google 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…
>the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap
I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#97If 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.
That should be an RPZ feed!
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats: famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut' 'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing. so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy. but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns. so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'. the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing bu…
So the gigantic incumbents with retail distribution being inefficient makes sense to me. What about the long tail of D2C brands that live on Meta ads? AFAIK, they live and die by their ROAS. I would have to believe that these companies just don't really exist to buy that Meta ads are a "con".
the roi is better at smaller corps that pay attention, but you would still be surprised.
and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.
note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.
but startups and other companies ... not the same.
well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.
but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.
the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.
also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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's AdSpam/fraud/bot-prevention team was, when I worked there, world class and fairly well funded, took their job seriously, and had access to all the data. It's an existential threat to the ad business, because if Google gets a reputation for being full of bots/spam, then the advertisers will bid lower per click/conversion to compensate, which means that legitimate website publishers will get paid less and go to other networks, which is a feedback loop that leads to the entire market collapsing (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons). It's absolutely worth refunding/zero-rating huge amounts of advertiser spend to avoid that situation, and they do.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.