I'll never get over game dev people arguing that I should spend half my budget on marketing, which they mean ads. The internet has so much fraud, bad actors and toxicity, yet it makes so much money.
Ads is just a tiny part of Marketing.
I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
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Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#352We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too. My feeling is th…
I've worked in different parts of the online ad industry for years. This is correct: fraud is a systemic and convenient part of the business model. The victims are the advertisers, who's in-house marketers don't know enough to detect/call out fraud.
Google itself forces advertisers into fraud-friendly products like PMAX. Then, when you detect the fraud, the hapless account rep says "ummm... maybe try using IP exclusion lists?" (Like one of the comments below). Google, with all the data it collects on people who click the ads, wants you to catch sophisticated fraud networks by manually building up IP blocklists. Yeah right.
And the victim of this entire ecosystem is your clever YC startup.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing this same story over and over. It's starting to sound like that's just Google's business model.
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
Google is an overwhelming market leader vertically and horizontally. Not only do they not have to compete with their competition. They don't have to compete for their competition's business partners. They don't have to compete at all.
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#354I spent ~1000 USD on Reddit for my game campaign for getting more wishes on Steam.
I set the related gaming subreddits.
After one month only ~38 new wishes, the other hundreds of clicks was for nowhere.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#355I spent ~1000 USD on Reddit for my game campaign for getting more wishes on Steam. I set the related gaming subreddits. After one month only ~38 new wishes, the other hundreds of clicks was for nowhere.
Reddit's ad platform is the worst imo. I pushed for trying it at my work and I ended up looking like a fool: it blew all the budget almost instantly on phantom clicks, with absolutely zero conversions. It's nowhere near as good as Meta's.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.
Reddit may be the most manipulated social media there is.
Yep, it's mostly bots, shills, and children and it's nothing new.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#357Only? In think that's actually not too bad. Could be worse
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#358I spent ~1000 USD on Reddit for my game campaign for getting more wishes on Steam. I set the related gaming subreddits. After one month only ~38 new wishes, the other hundreds of clicks was for nowhere.
[dead]
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that in any way equivalent to and ad buy on Reddit?
Because it's an obvious scam, just like buying ads on Reddit.
I thought reddit would have been a sensible place to advertise our b2b product, that caters to a quite technical audience in a way that is not very friendly to Linkedin targeting.
Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems about right, in the sense that these advertising companies are just fine dealing with scammers / taking their money … but there are corners of the same company that also have reasons to not allow that behavior and it becomes a circle where Google users and etc are banned for Google encouraged activity. Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer acce…
I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users. https://bsky.app/profile/atomic14.bsky.social/post/3mnc7ws2h... Perfectly fine according to google.
That’s funny. I reported that same ad last week to Google and got an email this morning saying that they were not violating any terms.