Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
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Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#2I bet this was a big Aha! moment
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#3We 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.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#4It's been a little while since I've used it, but doesn't Google let you do placement optimization based on meaningful conversions or other user-defined goals?
It sounds like the problem here was just Google's ad placement optimization looking for CTR alone as opposed to something that means more for Aha! (e.g., clicking past the landing page). In that case, the solution isn't so much in excluding certain platforms as much as optimizing for the right goals.
Unless your product/service really has no target audience among people who happen to use mobile or play games, excluding mobile/games with a blanket exclusion may be the wrong choice. Personally, I'd rather target whoever seems to be converting most in terms of things my business cares about rather than drawing arbitrary lines for which platforms see my ads.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#5[deleted]
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#6I 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 always from an iPad) would come back multiple times with about 10 hours between visits. I am guessing that Google doesn't show the same ad to a user for some time after there has been a click which explains the 10 hours. But we were mystified why people who never left the landing page would click an ad again and again. Once we realized it was kids playing games it became obvious. Many times I have had to rescue my kids who accidentally clicked on an ad while playing an iPad game and gotten lost in some website.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#7We 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 user-agent for all of the visitors was for tablets and not desktops.
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#8[deleted]
you can't exclude tablets with enhanced campaigns
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#9I had the same issue a few weeks ago. All my ads were shown to drawing apps for kids :(
Re: Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
#10We 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.
^^this.
awhile back, google decided it would be better to ram mobile traffic down your throat. ie when you buy from them mobile is included by default. thats not to say that mobile won't do well for you. you'd be best served to separate this. on the google content network you'd be better served to create specific placements instead of using keywords. especially in your case. you can get good traffic from the content network it just takes a bit of learning/tweaking.