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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

#161

Post by Dylan16807 »

DANmode wrote: post #74
Barbing wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They’re selling a limited ad-space - again, instead of to their competitor. 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 someone searches for a specific product, you could still have competitor ads in a relatively fair way, but you have to put them after the correct link. Putting them first is going to mislead so many people.

And you could advertise related products, or unrelated products. So many options there.

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

#162

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.

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

#166

Post by cannonpalms »

emdash wrote: post #126
cube00 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion. I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.

I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.

The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.

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

#167

Post by calmworm »

emdash wrote: post #126
cube00 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion. I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.

I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.

Reddit may be the most manipulated social media there is.

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

#168

Post by DANmode »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #161
DANmode wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re selling a limited ad-space - again, instead of to their competitor. 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 someone searches for a specific product, you could still have competitor ads in a relatively fair way, but you have to put them after the correct link. Putting them first is going to mislead so many people. And you could advertise related products, or unrelated products. So many options there.

Mandating Google choose the “one right” link is the failure point, here. (Not because I disagree.)

Similar problems with mandating that they track what’s considered a competitor.

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

#169

Post by calmworm »

econ wrote: post #58
rybosworld wrote: post #48

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…

Is this a typo? 20 min ad?! I don’t use YouTube.

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

#170

Post by calmworm »

xp84 wrote: post #134
sethops1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.

Serious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off. Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place,…

I don’t use YouTube at all but I can still answer - Because $16 will become $20, $30, $50 … and then they will begin to show ads again anyway.
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