Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dayzlegame.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 251 posts

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

#111

Post by xp84 »

bar000n wrote: post #82

Sorry, I am new here, but who funds that bot farm? i don't get it

The bot farm is a profit center, not a cost center. A corrupt 'publisher' (someone who agrees to show ads on their site/in their app) is having the bots bring up their own site, view the ads and install OP's app, which takes, say, $3 from the advertiser and pays, say, $2 to the publisher.

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

#113

Post by doctorpangloss »

G3nD wrote: post #39
dave_sid wrote: post #28

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.

Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.

It's complicated.

SMBs can find an audience that would otherwise be impossible to reach. The thing that is advertised is so diverse it's hard to generalize, however the main thing I've noticed is SMBs live and die by the quality of their ad creatives.

For big businesses which make up the other 50% of Meta ads revenue: They are very effective in circumstances where your main offering is operational and the long term value of a customer is very large. For example it would be a very good place to advertise health insurance and TV subscriptions (which is a significant amount of the big business spend). Here I am more certain. If you didn't invent your product, and it is a beneficiary of the zeitgeist promoted by social media itself (beauty-focused, soft core brain rot), and your thing is basically fungible, you will thrive.

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

#114

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mitxela wrote: post #93
yunusabd wrote: post #78

My favorite story: 1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store. 2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app. 3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic. https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...

Lawsuit time!

Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.

Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.

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

#115

Post by ocdtrekkie »

20k wrote: post #75
harry8 wrote: post #36

Earlier 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?

Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on

Let the Google Ads account run dry, discover your Analytics never actually goes down. It was just donating to multibillionaires the whole time.

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

#116

Post by pottspotts »

varispeed wrote: post #96
mitxela wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawsuit time!

I would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.

Are most Americans not able to fight an international tech conglomerate at the drop of a hat?

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

#120

Post by singingtoday »

dave_sid wrote: post #28

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.

We have a customer who's seeing ~30k in monthly revenue driven by their meta ads. So they can work. But they have a consult running the ads, and I assume they're doing filtering or something.
Post reply on HN