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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

#451

Post by jiggawatts »

emdash wrote: post #444
jiggawatts wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain it's true. Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time. On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... s…

Sometime you should look and see how many of those comments you made on reddit are instantly shadow removed. You don't get any up votes because nobody ever saw those comments to begin with.

They’re visible.

I have heard that shadow banning is more commonly used on Reddit than here, which just makes the problem worse: banning humans but allowing bots through.

PS: someone showed that around the time GPT 4 was released the use of em-dash on Reddit increased from 5% to 20% of comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1kfg9b8/oc...

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

#452

Post by Randstunde »

It happened the other way around for me. I wanted to make sure the bots were out of the game, but I ended up shooting myself in the foot. I offer shared focus rooms without an account where people can work side by side. One day an email security service opened every link in a mail I had sent, using a real browser and four different identifiers, and it looked to the counter like there were two students in the room, so I set up an IP filter to ensure accurate results. And I included my own IP address right away to keep my test runs out of the results. For a video, which was meant to illustrate the work side by side, I opened a browser tab that I filmed, and in another browser tab I played the role of the second person. What I hadn’t anticipated: since the recording took place on my own server, the IP addresses were correctly filtered out of the count. My video did show the correct room, but with the honest, but disappointing, truth: 0 people in that focus room.

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

#453

Post by xp84 »

calmworm wrote: post #396
xp84 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not willing to participate Nah, you're participating by watching. You'd have 100% of my respect and 100% moral high ground with your stance just by avoiding youtube.com.

Your assumption I’m watching is invalid.

Sorry, I didn’t realize you weren’t the other guy.

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

#455

Post by easyThrowaway »

whstl wrote: post #399
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 know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season. Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened. It's just how the whole company operates at this point.

If you spend that much money on ads you should be a Google Ad partner, and you usually get to have a dedicated, on-call support agent directly from Google.

We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.

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

#456

Post by itintheory »

itintheory wrote: post #316

How does the bot farm profit? Did I miss it in the article somehow?

Looked into it - the bot operators also own, or are associated with, the sites that show the ads. The site showing the ads gets some percentage from Google for each click through conversion, eg app install. So app owner pays $10, google keeps $4, bot / website operator keep $6 or whatever percentages.

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

#457

Post by GU_AI »

phenomen wrote: post #8

If 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.

[flagged]

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

#458

Post by kingstnap »

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.

As someone who used to use it a ton, Reddit is such a shadow of its former self that it's insane. It's actually like 90% bots. Their user growth numbers are all fake. The only real people on there are marketers making fake posts about an issue and commenting using alts and promoting a solution as a form of "AI engine optimization."

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

#459

Post by Nemo_bis »

dorgo wrote: post #283
Nemo_bis wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like to link an AdContrarian post https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-lo...

Does it matter from marketers perspective? I can measure incremental revenue/profit and decide based on that if the channel is worth it. I don't care if the rest of the money goes to the channel or is stolen.

That's the point, companies are not able to measure that. At all.

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

#460

Post by econ »

sethops1 wrote: post #79
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…

These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.

It is giving me 1+ hour ads now based on my view history (I think) and it is actually hilarious. I've watched two till the end. To keep someone engaged for that long you better bring something interesting to the table.
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