most people here bothered about why did 100 clicks show no activity.
I have built 10+ products, and played a little with meta/google/linkedin ads and SEO to know that it takes atleast 5000+ clicks for any meanignful pattern to appear. 1k-5k is a scratch, 5k-50k is a tiny traction, 50k-100k is a signal, 100k-1M means retirement.
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
#242Google 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.
Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta. It is not to protect the children.
It's to remove Meta's liability for failing to protect children. They only have to protect children if the parent selects an age less than 16.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds awesome, what's the catch?
You also get to run credit card fraud purchases through your home internet connection, such fun times we live in.
So what's the catch? Has anyone ever been arrested for proxying a fraudulent credit card transaction?
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
No that makes no sense. They only need a tiny device to act as a proxy. It makes no sense to colocate the expensive GPUs
Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.
You can offer them a free anything, really. It's a pretty convenient way to pay, that mostly doesn't affect the user at all (unless their connection is very slow), but generates value.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 detec…
It doesn't have to be a class action. In fact it's worse for the defending company if they get 500 separate lawsuits than one class action.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You still get your money back
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more. Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
Who benefits from the fraud, though?
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#248Did you dispute the charge with your card issuer? If you can document that 60% of installs were not human, you may have a decent chargeback case
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#249If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/ After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
Do you have that bot ASN list somewhere? I am asking because I maintain botnet ASNs that are spamming/phishing/scamming our customers, and this would be a nice complementary category for it. Most often I realized that a lot of those "growth" companies have rotating ASNs that they go through after each larger spamming campaign. I'd assume they do the same thing in the admob/adclick world. [1] https://github.com/cookie…
I maintain one: https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#250Reading all the comments, it seems quite bleak to advertise. How do indies and SMBs reach audience these days then?