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Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

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Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#31

Post by spyder »

tezmc wrote: post #24

Similar 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…

Similar annoying thing with video pre-roll ads on Youtube: I'm used to pausing videos by clicking on them but when the video is an ad then it opens the link of the ad instead of pausing the video.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#32

Post by DanBlake »

Facebook is worse. If you use FB promoted/boosted posts you can not untarget mobile/tablets, which especially sucks if your ads are for desktop centric products.

Anyways- Is there a easy way on adwords to ONLY target desktop users? No tablets, no smartphones, no dumbphones.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#33

Post by DavidWanjiru »

I think google do sloppy shit whenever the "sloppiness" suits them. Take app permissions in the play store as an example; you mean to say google are so concerned by me installing unvetted apps that to do so, I have to click some check box somewhere in the settings, YET do not allow me to set app permissions on an app by app basis? That is downright sloppy, only it isn't really sloppiness, it's a state of affairs that one way or another suits their needs. Coz think about it: even after they've seen plenty of apps asking for permissions that are none of their business, apps that they've approved seeing as they're on the app store, they still don't change their permissions policy. I call that intentional slopiness.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#34

Post by oebs »

k1w1 wrote: post #28

Are 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).

Sure, there are plenty offerings, for example: Adobe AdLens, Adspert, Kenshoo, Marin Software, Wordstream.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#35

Post by babs474 »

This problem extends to more than just kids playing around on mobile games.

Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.

Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.

[1]http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-n...

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#36

Post by akosner »

k1w1 wrote: post #6
dudus wrote: post #2

I bet this was a big Aha! moment

The Aha! moment didn't come until I called Google and the support person pointed out that the placement screen wouldn't show data for today. Until that point we spent a few days scratching our heads wondering what could account for the weird traffic patterns. We have really detailed web analytics and the visitor patterns were just so unlike what we normally see. Especially the fact that the same visitor (almost alway…

What keywords did you use? Curious to see how unrelated games might have been related to your keywords.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#38

Post by AJ007 »

dperfect wrote: post #26
johnrob wrote: post #25

The 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 f…

The complaint originates from Google preventing advertisers from separating desktop & tablet bids. It is not that Google made ads available for mobile platforms but that they force you to purchase them. Kind of like if you want HBO.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#39

Post by dperfect »

AJ007 wrote: post #38
dperfect wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

The complaint originates from Google preventing advertisers from separating desktop & tablet bids. It is not that Google made ads available for mobile platforms but that they force you to purchase them. Kind of like if you want HBO.

Again, if you've set up your campaign to optimize for what you really want to see (not just clicks), then why would you even need to care about desktop vs tablets? There are more and more devices every day that blur the line between desktop and tablet, so it's really not that useful of a distinction to make.

What about desktops with touchscreens? People are probably just as likely to click your ad by mistake there as on a tablet. The problem isn't the platform or the method of user input. The problem is how your campaign is being optimized.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#40

Post by AJ007 »

k1w1 wrote: post #28

Are 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).

Google's platform has many auto management options. If you link your account with Google Analytics it gets really powerful. This is one of those areas you should either avoid completely or get a really good person putting 100% of their effort in to it. You can put it on auto pilot at some point, but that initial set up combined with landing page optimization on your side is critical and needs an exceptional effort. You are competing, in a psuedo-market, against the entire world for ad inventory.

Several years ago I spent a lot of money on one of the online ad management systems, but by the end of the 12 month contract there were more advanced features within Adwords than they had. There might be a good option out there now, but it is a moving target for that provider given constant change combined with pieces which aren't exposed by an API. (writing a custom scraper to automate data collection and tasks on a platform split testing their UI and features isn't very pretty either.)

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