101–110 of 136 posts
Small advertisers get screwed because they lack the technical expertise to understand the complexity of adtech platforms. Those complexities provide huge power and value to people who know what they’re doing, but also cause huge problems for advertisers.
I don’t know what happened in this case unfortunately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"is there any way to create a profitable Google Ad campaign without sinking thousands of money ramping up and learning?" Yes, it's called hiring an expert with a track record who will get you profitable a lot faster than you probably could yourself (assuming you are inexperienced).
Where do you find these experts? I've tried managing campaigns myself and concluded the same thing you did, but have struggled to find an expert. There are so many people online who claim they can run your campaign but I have a hard time separating the real experts from the "fake it til you make it" types.
UpWork is spotty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like at this point you'd come out ahead if you just mailed people 2 dollar bills with the promise of another 2 dollar bill if they install your app
Honestly, there's a lot of advertising out there that I think could benefit from direct monetary incentives. A large portion of the population is becoming resistant to regular advertising (good for them) and opting in to ad blockers when available. Actually paying people for the attention you're demanding from them would be refreshingly different... and heck, it worked for timeshares.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has such a gigantic incentive to lie about how effective their advertising is. It's impossible to verify and they make more money the more effective they say it is. So it's something I've suspected is happening for a long time. The question then becomes, what does the internet look like if advertisers only spent 10% of what they do now? How much of the internet is built on the lie that digital advertising work…
In 1995 the Internet existed, it was basically great, and basically no website was ad funded. I cannot think of a single essential service I use on the Internet today which is ad funded. If it's essential I'm paying for it because the free, ad-funded version is shitty and unreliable. We could ban Internet advertising tomorrow (give people time to migrate to paid services) and I genuinely don't think it would have muc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"is there any way to create a profitable Google Ad campaign without sinking thousands of money ramping up and learning?" Yes, it's called hiring an expert with a track record who will get you profitable a lot faster than you probably could yourself (assuming you are inexperienced).
Where do you find these experts? I've tried managing campaigns myself and concluded the same thing you did, but have struggled to find an expert. There are so many people online who claim they can run your campaign but I have a hard time separating the real experts from the "fake it til you make it" types.
When working with smaller numbers, you are going to be working with someone who is a little less experienced, more than likely. So, finding someone who can share a solid, provable track record may be a little harder. Figuring out a compensation scheme that takes their inexperience into account and shifts some of the risk to them as a result of this is key. You cannot enter a deal in which they just take a percentage of ad spend, because if they don't produce sales, then they get their money and you lose big.
I guess what I am trying to say is that you need to focus on the actual "deal" that you make with the person running your CPA campaigns to ensure that the risk is a bit more balanced and incentives are aligned...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has such a gigantic incentive to lie about how effective their advertising is. It's impossible to verify and they make more money the more effective they say it is. So it's something I've suspected is happening for a long time. The question then becomes, what does the internet look like if advertisers only spent 10% of what they do now? How much of the internet is built on the lie that digital advertising work…
I mean, isn't that basically what the first .com was about? :) Everyone went from thinking every page view was equivalent to a magazine/tv/radio ad view, paying 5-10$ CPM and then everyone wised up and the industry was decimated for a while.
16,171 converted and pre-registered for the app 1,371 either installed it when they got the push notification or selected auto install when they pre-registered (it's oped in) Cost was $22k USD ish. This is extremely normal... it's almost exactly as I would expect, maybe even good! I'm curious why they would expect differently?
I agree with the author's assessment that only 1371 users were actually converted and they were charged inappropriately.
In google ads a conversion is clearly defined as the users clicks the link and then completed a second action (pre-register in this instance). When you create a campaign, you define the goal like this: when a user clicks the link and pushes the pre-registration button the user goal of conversion is complete.
Just because you don't like what happened thereafter isn't the concern of the ad platform.
This doesn’t surprise me. A user has a need - in this case a food diet app. They find this app, think it looks good, and registers their interest. Good. Launch day comes around, they’re nowhere to be seen - why? Well, they may have found another app, or decided they don’t need the app after all - say they lost interest in the diet / health kick. I feel like app registrations would only work for “special” apps that do…
In the docs it makes it clear that there are a bunch of caveats to the auto installation. Reading through these caveats, they are all there for good UX reasons, essentially to ensure that what gets advertised is what gets installed (no bait-and-switch), and that users are going to be ok with the auto-installation (doesn't eat all their data or battery life). There is advice on how to improve eligibility, it's not clear if the author followed this or not.
The eligibility factors will vary from user to user, and may between user bases as well. For example if you have an app that is popular with users on devices with less storage space, there are likely to be more who can't install it because they don't have enough space.
One or more of these factors may not have been met for the author/publisher of this app, and it's also possible that their target market also doesn't meet the conditions for auto-install as much.