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Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

blog.aha.io

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Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#61

Post by Aldo_MX »

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…

I also hate that, websites should reserve the space for ads, to prevent this FOUC-alike effect to happen :/

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#62

Post by dperfect »

SyneRyder wrote: post #43
dperfect wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't optimize your ads for conversions until you've already had a minimum number of conversions (I think 30 per month?). Google can still run up hundreds of dollars of paid clicks that will never result in conversions before then (and mobile apps for kids are one way to do that). As for desktop vs tablet, some people might be advertising a tablet-only app or a desktop-only app. In that case it's best to advertis…

That's true. Still doesn't mean you should optimize for CTR when you're really interested in conversions. But I do see your point that in some cases - especially when starting a new campaign on a tight budget, it would be useful to manually target the campaign with more precision (including tablets vs desktop control and more obvious control for apps). Ideally, Google would allow people to start optimizing for conversions from the beginning, but I guess their algorithms have to start with something (clicks being the most abundant form of response data).

As for the desktop-only or tablet-only app, I'd still rather let that work itself out with conversion optimization (given that download conversions can be tracked effectively) rather than assuming my conversions are going to come through a certain channel. It comes down to the idea of making marketing decisions based on real data rather than what we're "sure" is best.

It just sounds like many people don't bother setting up conversion optimization out of ignorance - they think Google is somehow doing this app/game placement just to try and steal people's money, when really it's just a natural consequence of the CTR optimization. In the case of Aha!, it appears that most of the "wasted" money was spent before even realizing what was going on - and once they did figure it out, they apparently found the way exclude mobile apps without too much trouble (though I'd agree Google should make it easier).

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#64

Post by Barraketh »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #57
balls187 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any resources that talk about how to optimize for conversions?

In AdWords it's under Tools - Conversions You have to setup conversion, and insert corresponding javascript into your conversion page. Than make your AdWords campaigns to focus on conversions instead of clicks.

This, if you would like to do it yourself. However, the display advertising space is not currently as turnkey as search advertising, so in most cases you're better off handing off the trafficking of the campaign to an ad network. Quantcast and RocketFuel are two that focus specifically on delivering conversions, and both consistently beat Google on CPA (cost per action). Disclaimer: I currently work at Quantcast.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#65

Post by shostack »

k1w1 wrote: post #7
nekitamo wrote: post #3

We had a similar problem with mobile search ads. The vast majority of clicks we got were misclicks, which is very painful when you're bidding $5+ click. We fixed the issue by putting a -90% bid on mobile ads. Now once every few months someone from Google calls us and tries to convince us to remove that -90% bid, assuring us the traffic is good and will convert. Pretty sleazy.

In our account penalizing the bid for mobile ads didn't help because it looks like Google treats 'mobile' and 'tablets' separately. So we prevented ads on phones, but you can't penalize the bid for tablets so that doesn't work to prevent games on iPads. The Google support person told me they can't tell the difference between tablets and desktops, but I don't believe that for a second. Our own analytics clearly showed…

The Google support person may not be fully informed, but they are provably incorrect in that claim.

Simply put, Google used to offer the ability to include/exclude devices based on desktop/tablet/mobile device types. Additionally, they offer the ability in their device segment reports in the AdWords UI to see what device did what. They have the data.

When Enhanced Campaigns were launched in the not so distant past, there was a large uproar from the paid search community (of which I consider myself apart of given my search agency background). It was very much a sense of them forcing mobile traffic despite our wishes and the negative bid modifier for mobile was something we had to push them on.

At the time, Google took the stance that tablet traffic/usage was largely indistinguishable from desktop traffic, so it shouldn't be a problem to blend those. Anyone with half a clue in this field could point out several reasons why that was false, but we were unsuccessful in getting that changed.

There have been a few changes to AdWords targeting and settings in the past couple of years that were pretty large steps back for savvy advertisers, and this was one of them.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#66

Post by jayd16 »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #33

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…

>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?

This makes sense from an API perspective. If you could disable permissions then the developer would have to check for permission every time it did something. This sounds simple but in terms of the amount of dialogs and screens and such that you have to add for every use case explodes in number.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#67

Post by shostack »

hagbardgroup wrote: post #59

The way to avoid wasting money like this is to ramp up your spending gradually using what's called 'discovery campaigns.' This is a risk management method that helps you to avoid the shittiest publishers (which is almost all of them). If you had done this you could have avoided this unhappy incident. You can also bypass discovery campaigns by just running managed placements, which means whitelisting certain publisher…

As a "professional advertiser" myself with a deep background in search this is spot on.

Also, people don't poke around enough in the help files or in the settings for their targeting to see that there are easy ways to avoid this from the start.

For example, Site Category Exclusions would be a good start, although the specific negatives they mention are good to note as well since I'm not sure the category exclusions will catch everything.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#68

Post by skj »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #33

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…

Allowing users to set which of any possible 2^N subsets of these N types of permission would cause a lot of developer complication and errors, and people complaining about buggy apps, making the android platform "seem" buggy all the time.

Your analysis is off.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#69

Post by hippee-lee »

hullo wrote: post #22
halisaurus wrote: post #21

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 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.

This is the approach I took. If the developer offered an adds free app I would gladly pay for it not to have to deal with "Daddy, the iPad is broken." only to find that Safari had launched and taken her away from her game.

Now that she is old enough to read and some of the game apps she has used her money to buy prompt her to upgrade I just tell her we don't do in app upgrades and she is very adept at dismissing the prompts. Fwiw - Toca Boca apps are great. I still see her playing them occasionally although in the past few months her interest in digital games has really fallen off and she wants to play some of the board games or hide-and-seek instead.

Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads

#70

Post by DavidWanjiru »

skj wrote: post #68
DavidWanjiru wrote: post #33

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…

Allowing users to set which of any possible 2^N subsets of these N types of permission would cause a lot of developer complication and errors, and people complaining about buggy apps, making the android platform "seem" buggy all the time. Your analysis is off.

If an app "wants to do x", where x is a defined do-able thing, then it shouldn't be too complex to say no. It's not like an app wants permission to drown my puppy in the aquarium in the living room; it wants to do things set as do-able in android. I don't see what's so complex about that. Instead of a blanket permission policy where an app fails to work because I didn't install it coz I don't like the permissions it wants, let apps fail because I denied them permissions I didn't deem necessary. An app can simply tell me it won't work unless I allow it to drown my puppy in the living room aquarium, and once I say "leave my puppy alone", it stops working and sulks away. Mind you, I'm not a developer, so I don't know what I'm talking about at a technical level. I just want to be able to say no when a flash light app wants to send sms messages. Or when a flea extermination app wants to drown my puppies.
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