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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

#371

Post by brazukadev »

neom wrote: post #277

I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In Jan…

ads have gone so wild I'm afraid this post might be a targeted ad for LinkedIn

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

#372

Post by quikoa »

mitxela wrote: post #370
bluGill wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes and winning from Google in small claims court is definitely possible: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1...

Edit:

AI can be a great help here, ask it:

- How to prepare your case for your country.

- Where to file and how much it going to cost.

- Help you find weaknesses in your case and what you can do to fix those.

- Rewrite your text in proper legalese (I do recommend to prepare the your arguments yourself to avoid over generalization from an LLM).

Of course you need to verify because of hallucinations but showing up is half the battle here. Big (tech) corps + internal bureaucracy makes it quite expensive for fight these cases. Especially if there are many different countries.

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

#373

Post by MBCook »

necovek wrote: post #233
MBCook wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect the water company to check your water for poison?

Liability when it happens? Don't all water companies do it? And while it may point at what we could do with Google and the likes, the risk profile is still a bit different (make many people ill or die vs "unknowingly" stealing some money).

My comment was meant to be sarcasm. I see that didn’t come through.

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

#374

Post by fnord77 »

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 I'm bored sometimes I look up what the current high price keywords are and then search for that and click those ads

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

#375

Post by carlosjobim »

kimi wrote: post #359
carlosjobim wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's an obvious scam, just like buying ads on Reddit.

I thought reddit would have been a sensible place to advertise our b2b product, that caters to a quite technical audience in a way that is not very friendly to Linkedin targeting.

Give affiliates 15% commission for any successful sales they make. Then you don't have to think about marketing and you don't have to throw any money into a black hole.

Buying ads is always a scam.

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

#376

Post by bartread »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #200
duxup wrote: post #173

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.

I’ve seen and reported that exact ad, and variations thereof, multiple times. Each time my report has been rejected on the basis the ad didn’t violate ToS for advertisers. Google absolutely sucks nowadays.

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

#377

Post by aorloff »

jfoster wrote: post #225
aorloff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate. So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."

That seems in the interest of the savvy media teams, but surely Google would be better off having a market that encourages all healthy competition?

Would the casinos benefit from a careful presentation of the mathematical odds of all the games and how to best position your wagers ?

Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?

The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long

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

#378

Post by elictronic »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #295
adamtulinius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I too reported it a long time ago, with the predictable response that it’s not breaking any of Google’s rules. It also tells me how primitive Google Ads are, when they keep showing me an ad I reported.

I also reported it - twice - and was fobbed off. The frustrating thing is, this is very easy for AI to detect. Just feed the image into any AI and it will tell you it is deceptive.

When you are being paid to not care it becomes very hard to care.

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

#379

Post by aorloff »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #230
aorloff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate. So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."

For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads. Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally usele…

Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else.

ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard

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

#380

Post by throwuxiytayq »

jfoster wrote: post #224
weare138 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this same story over and over. It's starting to sound like that's just Google's business model.

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.

Do not attribute malice (or even intention) to which can be explained by Google-level incompetence.
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