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

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141–150 of 434 posts

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

#141
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to do the install to get paid for the ad click, right?

Surprisingly, no. 29 of the 30 zero-time installs had no click at all; Google credited them to someone watching the video. The install isn't what gets the farm paid. It's what makes Google's bidding think that placement is working, so it sends it more of your ads.

It probably also so Google doesn't statistically detect the action rate is too low and suspend the customer of the bot farm from getting paid.

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

#142
post #91

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

#144
post #39

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

#145
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Calling them a "hyperscaler" is a stretch. By all accounts it's some renewables startup that's trying to pivot into AI because obviously AI = $$$, and calling themselves a "hyperscaler" in the process. Calling them a "hyperscaler" makes as much sense as some guy who runs a homelab in his basement as a "datacenter". https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...

My thoughts exactly. In the current environment you could slap "AI" on a potato and get $$$ for it.

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

#146
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Problem 1: Buyers cannot tell if a product is good or bad, so they offer less money and good sellers may leave.

Suppose 50% of used laptops are good and worth $1,000, while 50% are bad and worth $400. Since you cannot tell which one you are buying, the average value is 0.5x1000 + 0.5x400 = $700, so you will not want to pay more than about $700.

But owners of good laptops may refuse to sell for $700, so more good laptops leave the market and the chance of buying a bad one increases. And the only guy selling for $700 is the lemons.

Problem 2: The theory assumes buyers already know how many bad products are in the market, but in real life they often do not.

Its obvious this market for lemons can’t be true

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

#147
post #131
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by a pay app?

If "Dayzle" (the app being advertised?) cost $5 to install, bot downloads would stop immediately.

So would human downloads, too. Mass audiences do not buy apps. They sometimes buy in-app purchases after installing them, but in terms of games, it's mostly the 'casino games for children' genre that make 90% of that kind of revenue.

Also, all else being equal, earning potential of paid or subscription apps on Android is usually an order of magnitude less than on iOS, due to the self-selection effect of people who buy $1200 phones tend to have more disposable income than someone who buys the median Android phone which costs much less. So, trying to sell a paid casual game, especially on Android, is not going to pay the bills the way an ad-supported free app would. Sadly.

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

#148
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

"that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inefficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'." is easy to disprove because we know how much these companies spend on advertising (and marketing more broadly) and how much product they sell.

It's more like 25% of their budget.

https://www.statista.com/topics/7725/cpg-industry-advertisin...

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.

Sounds awesome, what's the catch?

[dead]

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

#150

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.

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