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

171–180 of 434 posts

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

#171

Post by ksajadi »

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.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky for 14 years but ads almost never work (as much as you pay for them).

Ad business is the best business: you pay for something no one can reliably verify or measure. But you still pay because there is something somewhere with some correlational relationship with an uplift in some of your metrics and you’re afraid to turn it off. So you just keep paying.

If you login to the admin side of any ad business (Reddit Ads, X Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc) you are faced with a severely broken product: broken buttons, obviously wrong metrics, and other glaring bugs.

But somehow you still trust that people who cannot pull the CRUD side of the product off, are going to serve your ad accurately to the targeted audience and give you reports.

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

#172

Post by StilesCrisis »

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,…

It's $29 per month for the family plan now.

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

#173

Post by duxup »

yunusabd wrote: post #87

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...

Seems about right, in the sense that these advertising companies are just fine dealing with scammers / taking their money … but there are corners of the same company that also have reasons to not allow that behavior and it becomes a circle where Google users and etc are banned for Google encouraged activity.

Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….

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

#174

Post by bluegatty »

awavering wrote: post #148
bluegatty wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

"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...

I didn't imply that all of their gross was going into ads.

I'm highlighting that the gross on commodity consumer goods is huge - and that it just pays for mounds of white collar bureaucracy, including advertising, and yes 25 points is about right.

Consider that companies pay more for advertising than COGS.

That should tell us something about 'productivity'

FB/Goog revenues could be cut by 60% and the good may very well flow just the same, aka they are not just capturing surplus but facilitate aggressive inefficient competition.

A western nation will post the $5.00 to the GDP when much of it is inefficient make-work.

This is why 'Pricing Parity' has to be used even to begin to compare relative wealth etc.

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

#176

Post by Dylan16807 »

DANmode wrote: post #168
Dylan16807 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I'm talking about the actual search results. They already do that part.

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

Well I said fair not mandatory, but they make enough money off these ads that they could handle it being mandatory.

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

#177

Post by dspillett »

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.

Going back to its roots: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v8xgq/watch...

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

#178

Post by Barbing »

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!

Feels unfair. Guess humans could be hired to try to prevent the situation in cases where it was on the obvious side of what was happening. Would increase the cost of ads or reduce ad network profits, and feel more fair?

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

#179

Post by dspillett »

Zak wrote: post #155
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta ads are mostly obvious fraud afaict - unregistered lotteries, jet washes that don't need power, flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them, household goods developed by NASA, air-conditioning/heating that doesn't need outside air and plugs direct into a socket, ... I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud. Wha…

> flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them Flashlights that can do this exist. I don't know if they're being advertised on Meta platforms.

The ones advertised on Meta platforms (and others like YouTube), at least the ones I've seen, claim to do so in a device that looks like it can't have more than a tiny battery and no cooling in there, or that they actualy show using standard AA batteries, or recharging inside an hour by solar energy, or other claim that thumbs its nose to the lawsof physics. But they must be real, after all that nice man left NASA to work on it and now the nasty commercial interests are trying to shut him down! I must buy one now while I still can!

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

mitxela wrote: post #111
yunusabd wrote: post #87

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!

[deleted]
Post reply on HN