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I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

lydiaoncybersecurity.com

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#41
post #3

Tl;DR: If you're a coder, running a marketing experiment is harder and more expensive than coding. Wish I'd just used Facebook Ads instead...

I was always told that Google's real customers were advertisers and that they would be treated well. Guess that's not the case. Google seems to be insistent on making it as hard as possible for people to utilize their products.

Most people's idea of the ad marketplace is not unlike that of a person that believes that they could rewrite Twitter in a weekend. Reality is orders of magnitude more complicated than it appears.

The easiest shortcut to expand one's mind is to see how everyone could commit fraud. So for advertisement, the click could be fraudulent, the website owner could be fraudulent, the ad buyer could be malicious, and the ad network could be misrepresenting reality to any/all comers. It gets even better when you consider the intermediaries between most merchant and placing ads, as they tend to talk to different ad people to help make the ads, place the ads, and have an ad strategy: None of those extra steps are clean of fraud or incompetence.

Now design a working system that is remotely resistant to the different sources of fraud that every party could be committing, all with minimal human-to-human contact, as many of the steps involve interactions where at least one side is completely uninterested in talking to a human on the other side, as that would cut profits.

The end result is probably not going to be all that much cleaner than the current situation, which is optimized for nobody. It's just a little less unoptimized for Google and Facebook, because they are a bigger player than anyone else mentioned.Still they also have to start from the perspective that every interaction they might have with a smaller player could involve fraud.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#42

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

I want one so bad. Only thing is, I'd like to run my own software on it - do you support modding?

yes and no.

It's easy if you just want to display your own content:

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

or, if you want to share your app with others, there is:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

It's hard if you want to run your own embedded code. I just haven't written the documentation for it and you would need your own UART flasher board.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#43

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

Oh wow I was just looking for something like this the other day. The actual calendaring feature isn't as useful to me as a live weather report and daily forecast (next 24 hour weather) plus tide chart. Can this be customized/hacked?

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#44
Has the author really learned that Gmail is a better fit than Outlook? Who is paying for this product? There is a fair chance that Outlook would open up more sales opportunities to businesses, that appears to be the most obvious way to generate some income.

Secondary, a lot of clicks came from India, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica and Argentina… is this the target market? Probably not.

It is an interesting experience for the author but it is unclear if they really learned anything. It looks to me like they have been potentially misguided by poor market research gathered by a bad ad campaign.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#45
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ship to Europe? And it says it's open - do you have docs for that? If so I'll buy one immediately. It's beautiful and surprisingly affordable for the size.

In terms of openness, there is this: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image... and this: https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma... I also want to make the esp32 controller itself more hackable in future, but I don't want to promise anything because that's quite a lot of work for me. ------- I'll ship within Europe as soon as I have bootstrapped the 7000 Euro necessary for C…

Are you aware of the CE Self Certification process?

https://cemarking.net/ce-marking-knowledgebase/ce-self-certi...

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want one so bad. Only thing is, I'd like to run my own software on it - do you support modding?

yes and no. It's easy if you just want to display your own content: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image... or, if you want to share your app with others, there is: https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma... It's hard if you want to run your own embedded code. I just haven't written the documentation for it and you would need your own UART flasher board.

Wow, very clever, just display an image! Does the image server really have to be on the Internet? Can I just enter a locally-resolvable hostname or IP address?

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#47

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

Awesome work, and awesome product. I want to plug a friend's project, 15 years ago, Google's Radish - https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/radish - Which looks pretty primitive and bulky by comparison but had excellent engineering and set of tradeoffs at the time. What's it's power draw? Can it be run from a battery for a few weeks? That's one of the big advantages of e-paper over a tablet screen (the other m…

It doesn't have an internal battery and I don't know the exact power draw.

But since it's in deep sleep most of the time, I don't think it draws a lot.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#49
post #35

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

Why mention Google calendar? Why not also display Outlook calendars or whatever? Seems like you could, and Google is probably wondering why you are trying to use their name in your product? Lots of red flags for this commodity product, which is issue three.

Commodity product? Are there other e-ink calendars/generic displays? I was looking for one the other day and came up with nothing.

Re: I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times

#50
post #43

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar. My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why. For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google. EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-comp…

Oh wow I was just looking for something like this the other day. The actual calendaring feature isn't as useful to me as a live weather report and daily forecast (next 24 hour weather) plus tide chart. Can this be customized/hacked?

You can point it to an image URL and it will refresh whenever that image changes.

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

So as long as you can dynamically serve an image of the content you want to see, you can connect the display to it.

Or you can even build an app that others can use (this is experimental still):

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

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