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

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

#191

Post by Gustomaximus » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:01 AM UTC

20k wrote: post #84

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

> advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on

Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.

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

#192

Post by Gustomaximus » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

ksajadi wrote: post #171

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 an…

Effectiveness can vary a bunch but the majority of the time bad results are correlated to the setup quality.

There are definitely industries and situations where ads are difficult to make perform, things like a single business working against aggregator heavy environment or markets where growth is more important than profit, but overall there's reason for hundreds billions spent on online ads, this when most business can track ROI results.

One of the bigger issues I see is even 'experts' hand over control to the ad platforms to optimise their spend. For better results often you need to manipulate the systems to work in your favour, which platforms try to limit but you do what you can.

One change I feel we need is for regulation around controls and data on ad platforms to stop this ever increasing 'give us your money and trust us' type behaviour.

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

#193

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #114

mitxela wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawsuit time!

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

This is what class actions are literally for. Yes, I know it sucks that the only people who make money are the lawyers, but it can result in some behavioral change.

Google is fine attracting bots when it makes money for itself, but it can clearly detect that bot traffic when it has to pay out. There is likely huge amounts of money in total that Google has collected money from in ad buys but that they could also detect as bots. I would think class action lawyers would be all over this given the total amount of money involved.

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

#194

Post by ulfw » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:24 AM UTC

killbot5000 wrote: post #188

ksajadi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam. So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual end customers/humans (i.e. not bot farms or paid for actors) who click are not clicking on purpose. I've seen so many bad Android apps that have performance issues where content is still rendering and by the time you've tapped on where you go an add banner/link loaded up and registered you clicking on that. Zero purchase ever done but numerous 'ad clicks' generated

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

#195

Post by calebkaiser » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

Grimblewald wrote: post #85

walrus01 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg. You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.

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.

Which hyperscalers are doing that? I've heard of one startup trying this, XFRA, currently in early pilot phases. But I'd be pretty surprised to hear that AWS or Google are paying people to host GPU clusters in their home.

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

#196

Post by Zak » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:29 AM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #179

Zak wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The brand name that comes to mind is the Wicked Lasers Flashtorch, which uses a 65W halogen bulb that emits most of its energy as infrared, and a ~30 Watt-hour Li-ion battery. The old-fashioned light source is better suited to party tricks than illumination.

More modern, and also capable of improvised cooking are handheld searchlights from Acebeam and Imalent with many large LEDs, cooling fans, and even bigger Li-ion batteries. There are third-party videos of these and the older halogen type cooking eggs and setting fire to paper on Youtube.

What you're describing from the ads obviously violates the laws of physics. An alkaline AA would have a hard time cooking an egg on a dead short.

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

#197

Post by econ » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

DANmode wrote: post #72

econ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90% This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours. PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad? Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.

I couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro.

It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.

> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)

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

#198

Post by Brybry » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

killbot5000 wrote: post #188

ksajadi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I always wonder who the hell is clicking these ads. I skip all you tube ads (thanks Adblock)… I never click banner ads on principle. I assume anything paying for my eyeball time is a scam. So who is this shit working on? These companies must have detailed profiles on “people who do what we tell them” as a whole class of people. Scary.

My elderly parents regularly click the sponsored links in Google search results.

I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times).

Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.

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

#199

Post by awavering » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

bluegatty wrote: post #174

awavering wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 we…

Toothpaste is a particularly high-margin product so it might not be the best example generally. COGS is generally the largest line item for CPG (or non-CPG products), and distribution isn't free either.

Toothpaste manufacturers can probably get away without advertising on FB/Goog, but I'm not sure that would work for other products or brands. It's not make-work to tell people about your product or service, although in markets with limited players you could see how a marketing arms race would drive prices up.

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

#200

Post by iamflimflam1 » Sat, Sep 12, 2026, 3:44 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #173

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 acce…

I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users.

https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h...

Perfectly fine according to google.