Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

dayzlegame.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–455 of 455 posts

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#451

Post by jiggawatts »

emdash wrote: post #444
jiggawatts wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain it's true. Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time. On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... s…

Sometime you should look and see how many of those comments you made on reddit are instantly shadow removed. You don't get any up votes because nobody ever saw those comments to begin with.

They’re visible.

I have heard that shadow banning is more commonly used on Reddit than here, which just makes the problem worse: banning humans but allowing bots through.

PS: someone showed that around the time GPT 4 was released the use of em-dash on Reddit increased from 5% to 20% of comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1kfg9b8/oc...

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#452

Post by Randstunde »

It happened the other way around for me. I wanted to make sure the bots were out of the game, but I ended up shooting myself in the foot. I offer shared focus rooms without an account where people can work side by side. One day an email security service opened every link in a mail I had sent, using a real browser and four different identifiers, and it looked to the counter like there were two students in the room, so I set up an IP filter to ensure accurate results. And I included my own IP address right away to keep my test runs out of the results. For a video, which was meant to illustrate the work side by side, I opened a browser tab that I filmed, and in another browser tab I played the role of the second person. What I hadn’t anticipated: since the recording took place on my own server, the IP addresses were correctly filtered out of the count. My video did show the correct room, but with the honest, but disappointing, truth: 0 people in that focus room.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#453

Post by xp84 »

calmworm wrote: post #396
xp84 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not willing to participate Nah, you're participating by watching. You'd have 100% of my respect and 100% moral high ground with your stance just by avoiding youtube.com.

Your assumption I’m watching is invalid.

Sorry, I didn’t realize you weren’t the other guy.

Re: I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots

#455

Post by easyThrowaway »

whstl wrote: post #399
weare138 wrote: post #186

Earlier 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 know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season. Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened. It's just how the whole company operates at this point.

If you spend that much money on ads you should be a Google Ad partner, and you usually get to have a dedicated, on-call support agent directly from Google.

We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.

Post reply on HN