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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

#361

Post by deaux »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #82
G3nD wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.

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…

I wonder if this depends a lot on location? Or a Facebook thing rather than Meta-wide, though I think they don't actually let you distinguish when running ads?

Until last year I used Instagram and most of the ads I got were actually relevant. Zero scams, mostly local businesses. If I'd been visiting pages about home decoration I'd get local furniture shops and so forth. Google ads were - and are - the opposite for me, totally irrelevant and frequently scammy.

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

#362

Post by hypfer »

dangero wrote: post #279
hypfer wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do? If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?

I doubt there were any damages — they were already refusing to pay us any payments we were owed.

I would expect that there could be some reputational damage coming from a written confession to fraud.

"This company is known for this kind of fraud" even though it isn't. But the paper says it is.

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

#363

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

#364

Post by losteric »

e40 wrote: post #247
ra wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.

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

#365

Post by nicholaides »

kimi wrote: post #228

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

#366

Post by [deleted] »

chrisjj wrote: post #300
kimi wrote: post #228

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

#367

Post by mitxela »

calmworm wrote: post #335
mitxela wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this commonplace logic. Why make the decision on the possible distant future? You can always just cancel when that happens.

The moment the cost went from free to more-than-free is “when that happened.” I’m not willing to participate.

You expect Google to serve thousands of petabytes per month (costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in raw bandwidth) for absolutely nothing in return?

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

#368

Post by stjadams »

hassleblad23 wrote: post #363

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.

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

#369

Post by mitxela »

walrus01 wrote: post #340
dwedge wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a possibility. I don't know about CSAM but I know someone who was arrested for death threats sent to a politician after running a tor exit node. Eventually not charged, but he lost all his computing equipment for a couple of months

From 2009: https://archive.torproject.org/websites/lists.torproject.org...

Has anything changed since 2009?

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

#370

Post by mitxela »

bluGill wrote: post #320
mitxela wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Problem is the guy here spent $100 on ads that went to bots, and thus can get his $100 back after spending a million on lawyers.

Small claims court is designed to minimize costs
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