I come from the other side of the glass. My toddlers have iPads and constantly tap ads that are usually larger than real, in-app actions. Often the ads are interstitial between two game screens, or float next to the content they are interested in. Besides being frustrating for the kids, I have to be vigilant on the content of the ads they're seeing. From my experience, the ads are not always appropriate for kids. I really wish Apple would offer a "No Ads in Kids Apps" policy.
Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#22I come from the other side of the glass. My toddlers have iPads and constantly tap ads that are usually larger than real, in-app actions. Often the ads are interstitial between two game screens, or float next to the content they are interested in. Besides being frustrating for the kids, I have to be vigilant on the content of the ads they're seeing. From my experience, the ads are not always appropriate for kids. I r…
Why sit around wishing that Apple would change the policy? Why not just vet the apps that you're installing? If you are considering a free app, it's probably going to have either (a) ads or (b) persistent in app purchase nags. There are lots of good kids apps with neither (check the Toca Boca catalog for instance) but they might set you back as much as $1-3.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#23I wonder if you can see as an advertiser which keyword caused your ad to be shown in a particular app? That would be pretty interesting as it would let you weed out ambiguous keywords (I don't know.. Memory the game vs memory as in RAM), and see real gaming of keywords (like a Flappy Bird clone with "Business", "Laywer" or "Mesothelioma" keywords).
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#24Similar to this, I noticed a pretty crappy thing Google are doing on Youtube on the ipad last night. I did a youtube search and went to tap the first result only to have it replaced with an ad just before I clicked it, taking me through to some ad.
I experimented with this a couple of times, both times I did a search, and about 0.5-1 second after the page loaded the first search result was shifted down and its position taken by an ad link that looked the same as a search result.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#25The architecture of the digital ad industry was created with computers in mind; it was only ported to touchscreens out of convenience. You just can't assume clicks imply intent on such inaccurate devices.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#26The architecture of the digital ad industry was created with computers in mind; it was only ported to touchscreens out of convenience. You just can't assume clicks imply intent on such inaccurate devices.
So don't optimize your campaigns simply for clicks.
A lot of people here are complaining that Google is doing something "shady" by making ads available to mobile platforms (mobile ads are here to stay regardless of how people feel about them - and that's not Google's fault) and optimizing by default for clicks (there's not much else that would be better as a default).
If it's not just clicks you want, then optimize for whatever you care about - conversions, sales, whatever. Mobile has simply made that distinction more clear than before.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#27Everything in adwords seems designed to dump more money into google than you want to. Ads going to wrong places, "enhanced" campaigns that make it impossible to ignore mobile and tablet traffic, questionable quality score rating, etc. I've had my fill of it. Better to hire a firm to let them handle the mess.
Without any doubt in my mind, Google has switched from optimizing for user experience to optimizing for revenue. This should be appalling, amazing, and a major red flag for investors -- because it means Google is fighting hard to keep their revenue growth.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#28Are there any SaaS apps that people recommend for managing online advertising?
The Google ads UI is overly complex for a typical small company, and that obfuscates what it really going on with your ads. In addition I would love to see a UI that automatically handled experimentation and A/B testing with display ads (by automatically generating the ad images based on set of possible captions and background images).
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#29When I saw the title I thought, "oh another article by someone who has no idea what they are doing complaining about advertising on X platform not working and being a waste of money.
Except I have been seeing the same thing.
Google has all of the data. They know that publisher X's inventory performs at 1/100th (or less) of the competitions. They should be smart priced accordingly, at about a penny per click.
It was initially shocking. I have used a lot of ad platform in the past (nearly) decade and Google was the only one that consistently delivered high quality traffic that was obviously real people.
Here are a few other really dirty tricks Google will play on you:
#1 If you are selling ads from the publishing side, Google will sell you your own ads by running ads on your site unless you explicitly exclude your site from every ad campaign.
#2 Engagement ads. These are video ads that play on a mouse over. They report a mouse over as a "click."
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#30Similar to this, I noticed a pretty crappy thing Google are doing on Youtube on the ipad last night. I did a youtube search and went to tap the first result only to have it replaced with an ad just before I clicked it, taking me through to some ad. I experimented with this a couple of times, both times I did a search, and about 0.5-1 second after the page loaded the first search result was shifted down and its positi…
This same thing has happened to me with some Android apps using Google ads, such as Podkicker.