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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

#221

Post by jfil »

kimi wrote: post #150

We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too. My feeling is th…

I've worked in different parts of the online ad industry for years. This is correct: fraud is a systemic and convenient part of the business model. The victims are the advertisers, who's in-house marketers don't know enough to detect/call out fraud.

Google itself forces advertisers into fraud-friendly products like PMAX. Then, when you detect the fraud, the hapless account rep says "ummm... maybe try using IP exclusion lists?" (Like one of the comments below). Google, with all the data it collects on people who click the ads, wants you to catch sophisticated fraud networks by manually building up IP blocklists. Yeah right.

And the victim of this entire ecosystem is your clever YC startup.

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

#223

Post by timpera »

mococa wrote: post #222

I spent ~1000 USD on Reddit for my game campaign for getting more wishes on Steam. I set the related gaming subreddits. After one month only ~38 new wishes, the other hundreds of clicks was for nowhere.

Reddit's ad platform is the worst imo. I pushed for trying it at my work and I ended up looking like a fool: it blew all the budget almost instantly on phantom clicks, with absolutely zero conversions. It's nowhere near as good as Meta's.

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

#226

Post by jose_zap »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #139
duxup wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s funny. I reported that same ad last week to Google and got an email this morning saying that they were not violating any terms.

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

#227

Post by hassleblad23 »

We had the same experience with our google ads across multiple campaigns. Tried everything from increasing the tCPA and daily limits significantly, to creating campaigns in 1st world countries only. Around 80% of the installs just opened the app and closed it after few seconds without performing a single action, not even a tap!

Google does not give you a detailed breakdown of where all the ad was shown within Google's services. They do give a breakdown of the 3rd party websites and apps where the ads ran and they are all terrible shorts drama and html5 games websites for me - some of them even had the same UI with different URLs! Shame.

Ideally I would like my app's ad to be placed in the Play Store only, but Google doesn't allow this control conviniently.

Next I am going to try using in-app actions for conversion instead of install, but I doubt it will be helpful at all.

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

#228

Post by nicholaides »

kimi wrote: post #150

We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too. My feeling is th…

I hope Reddit is not charging advertisers per ad video play.

As a mobile reddit user, I’ve noticed that the app treats ads differently than regular posts. They are more sensitive to taps than regular posts and I frequently accidentally trigger ad videos playing by scrolling past them but I never accidentally trigger regular videos.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

chrisjj wrote: post #194
kimi wrote: post #150

We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too. My feeling is th…

> When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. He was probably busy clicking ads...

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by stjadams »

hassleblad23 wrote: post #227

We had the same experience with our google ads across multiple campaigns. Tried everything from increasing the tCPA and daily limits significantly, to creating campaigns in 1st world countries only. Around 80% of the installs just opened the app and closed it after few seconds without performing a single action, not even a tap! Google does not give you a detailed breakdown of where all the ad was shown within Google'…

If your app is monetized, you might try pushing purchases as conversions. Obviously you’d adjust your tCPA to account for the higher CPA value.
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