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I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
- mchusma 5d agoGoogle display ads are completely unusable for me (not app ads). So much flagrant fraud. Like even the most simple of AI models could detect the fraud. Very disappointing.
- odie5533 5d agoDid they like your app?
- guywithahat 5d ago> I’ll report back on the refund. Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
- nickabe 5d agoThanks, and agreed. The in-app goal was the lesson, and I'd rather have learned it at $220 than at a trial-run budget. The part I found interesting is that Google's count wasn't wrong: there really were 21 installs. You only saw the problem by looking at which version of the app they installed. The YC advice is roughly where I've ended up too. And fair point on the refund, I'm not holding my breath, but I'll report back either way.
- yalok 5d agothis is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition... From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis. And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
- shepardrtc 5d ago"Bots? In my ecosystem?"
- legonigel 5d agoWhat is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
- rationalist 5d agoOne reason: It helps makes the bot accounts look more legit. It's why Facebook bot accounts like random legit pages.
- LoganDark 5d agoThis was my thought too. It's easy to pretend to click one ad in order to make that ad money. But it's also easy for Google to tell apart a huge number of accounts that all clicked that one ad and no others. However, if a huge number of accounts simply click a whole load of ads there's basically no way to tell that it was targeted at any particular ad + they can bot for multiple ads at once.
- Sayrus 5d agoThe bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application. In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.
- wilbo 5d agoI'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean: Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.
- 5d ago
- blitzar 5d agoWhen you are talking to your VC, they are just "installs"
- nickabe 5d agoI guess that's the nice thing about not having a VC... there's no advantage to spinning to anything other than fraud lol.
- taylorfinley 5d agoHey, I need to add that to my list of reasons to build without vc [0] [0] https://novc.fyi/why https://novc.fyi/why
- oleggromov 5d agoCalling up a bot farm owner pre-pitch is "partnership"
- phenomen 5d agoIf you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/ https://ipgeolocation.io/ After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
- xfour 5d agoIs there an open database of this?
- jasondigitized 5d ago+1
- nickabe 5d agoYeah if there's a DB that would be helpful - I'm not currently capturing the IP, but I'll see if I can add it in a future release.
- mr_mitm 5d agoThere is https://knock-knock.net/ https://knock-knock.net/, which is similar
- walrus01 5d agoThis is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg. You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
- nekusar 5d agoYep. And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free" Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy. And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
- xnx 5d agoSwitch to a pay app and the problem goes away.
- ebx 5d agoWhat do you mean by a pay app?
- xnx 5d agoIf "Dayzle" (the app being advertised?) cost $5 to install, bot downloads would stop immediately.
- xp84 5d agoSo would human downloads, too. Mass audiences do not buy apps. They sometimes buy in-app purchases after installing them, but in terms of games, it's mostly the 'casino games for children' genre that make 90% of that kind of revenue. Also, all else being equal, earning potential of paid or subscription apps on Android is usually an order of magnitude less than on iOS, due to the self-selection effect of people who buy $1200 phones tend to have more disposable income than someone who buys the median Android phone which costs much less. So, trying to sell a paid casual game, especially on Android, is not going to pay the bills the way an ad-supported free app would. Sadly.
- sergiotapia 5d agoHow much of Google's revenue is just scams? Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link. Fugazi!
- Barbing 5d agoOtherwise their competitor gets top billing for their very own brand name. See this on Apple’s App Store too. Feels very unfair.
- DANmode 5d agoThey’re selling a limited ad-space - again, instead of to their competitor. In that context: suggest a fairer way. Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!
- sethammons 5d agoThe fairer thing is what Google _used_ to do: organic results in the main column, ads in the sidebar. Searchers get to see competitors without confusing them for the real thing.
- Dylan16807 5d agoIf someone searches for a specific product, you could still have competitor ads in a relatively fair way, but you have to put them after the correct link. Putting them first is going to mislead so many people. And you could advertise related products, or unrelated products. So many options there.
- DANmode 5d agoMandating Google choose the “one right” link is the failure point, here. (Not because I disagree.) Similar problems with mandating that they track what’s considered a competitor.
- carlosjobim 5d agoDigital marketing is a solved problem. You pay a commission on verified real sales to affiliates, and they can do what the hell they please to make those sales. If somebody like Google or Meta cannot promise X amount of sales for Y amount of ad money spent, then you are a fool to give them any money. They have all the algorithms and profiles on everybody, so it's their job to match your product to customers. Why should you have to tweak who will be targeted? Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
- Dwedit 5d agoHoney says Hi.
- aetherspawn 5d agoYou kind of said everything but nothing all at once. If not Google then where?
- carlosjobim 5d agoDepends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads. But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
- rybosworld 5d agoSEO is not nearly as effective as it used to be. Organic click through rates have been trending way down since AI responses were added to the top of the search results. So this really isn't just a case of "you're holding it wrong".
- carlosjobim 5d agoIf you're selling something, you love having the AI talking about your product. The move to AI is not a negative for businesses wanting to reach customers organically - on the contrary.
- dave_sid 5d agoGoogle ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
- jLaForest 5d agoThis was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads
- reddalo 5d agoThe main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways. I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to: - only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for) - only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs) - disable AI Max - disable all automations - reject any of their "optimization" tips - set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
- myth2018 5d agoAlso: run experiments to find an "optimal" budget with the right size for your target audience. If you, e.g., set a too restrictive geographic rule, but also set a budget higher than what they manage to burn showing your ads at the area you defined, they will override the rules you set up to guarantee 100% of your money will be burnt.
- cube00 5d ago> only enable Google Search ads Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
- G3nD 5d ago
- erwan577 5d agoThe app appears unavailable in France in Google Play is that expected ? My phone is a pixel.
- nickabe 5d agoYeah sorry - adding it to Europe probably next week though.
- alfiedotwtf 5d agoWho would waste their time running a bot farm just to click ads? Almost sounds like Google are paying these farms
- compiler-guy 5d agoPeople who own the click farms who get paid to run the ads when they are clicked on. This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.
- PunchyHamster 5d agoOk but normally, the ads are on site, site owner pays click farms to click the ads, he earns on the difference between ad revenue and click cost. How does that work for an app that's just some game ?
- wswin 5d agothe same way, app is the advertised products
- MiroslavPokorny 5d agoDont worry, bots are the new rich, just look at the trillion dollar AI companies.
- fHr 5d agoGoogle promoting scams via ads 24 7 these days
- signumhq 5d ago[flagged]
- rybosworld 5d agoI've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common. And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
- econ 5d agoYou had huge click farms back in the days. Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90% The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product? Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
- DANmode 5d ago> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90% This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours. PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad? Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
- econ 5d agoI couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro. It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined. > ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours. You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)
- sethops1 5d agoThese bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.
- pseudonymidy 5d agoYour post led me to install your app and play through 10 puzzles. The post doesn’t even show the app! What’s the name for this sort of marketing? I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
- DANmode 5d agoKnowing your audience, and captivating them at grassroot level or in an unexpected place, without making it feel scummy (sometimes)? Guerrilla marketing.
- tough 5d agoI'd say "Content marketing" [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
- nickabe 5d agoThanks very much - really means a lot that you enjoyed it, we put a lot of effort into making it.
- inemesitaffia 5d agoDrop a link. Don't want to search
- lucashollingshe 4d agohttps://apps.apple.com/ca/app/dayzle-daily-brain-games/id6795661698 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/dayzle-daily-brain-games/id679...
- atuladhar 5d ago[dead]
- XCSme 5d agoThis will always remind me of the post I made 10 years ago, with Facebook ads being 100% robots... With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...
- yunusabd 5d agoMy favorite story: 1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store. 2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app. 3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic. https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_google_to_ban_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
- mitxela 5d agoLawsuit time!
- ventana 4d agoHere's a quote from their terms and conditions: Governing Law; Venue. All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense Terms or the Services will be governed by California law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules, and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA, and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts. Okay, I do indeed live in Santa Clara County, California, so if I ever get in a situation where I might want to sue Google Ads, I might as well try and see how local courts work, especially if the claim is small enough for the small claims court. For those who do not live here, it might be a prohibitive requirement.
- varispeed 5d agoI would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.
- pottspotts 5d agoAre most Americans not able to fight an international tech conglomerate at the drop of a hat?
- mitxela 5d agoEven a failed lawsuit has the potential to cost the company a lot more money than it costs you. If it's small claims court the company has to pay a lawyer hourly to attend as their representative, while you just have to show up and pay the small court fee. If it's big claims court, well, you always have the option to represent yourself, and then you'll probably lose, but at least you won't have spent much money.
- bar000n 5d agoSorry, I am new here, but who funds that bot farm? i don't get it
- xp84 5d agoThe bot farm is a profit center, not a cost center. A corrupt 'publisher' (someone who agrees to show ads on their site/in their app) is having the bots bring up their own site, view the ads and install OP's app, which takes, say, $3 from the advertiser and pays, say, $2 to the publisher.
- chung8123 5d agoAt this point you have to just factor bots into your marketing costs. You have to go by overall cost per acquisition not cost per click.
- gsky 5d agoGoogle cheats publishers also. all big companies are evil these days
- vedmed 5d ago80% of my web traffic is bots even mom and pop shops
- 9991 5d ago40% less than you deserve.
- patrickdavey 5d agoI'm sure this is a basic question I should already understand, but, what is actually in it for the bot farm? They spend your money (annoying), but, does Google actually pay them somehow? I don't get what they are "farming"
- tough 5d agoYes AdSense pays 3rd party publishers locating your ads on their site. They fake their site click through rate with bots, and get paid as if they had real users clicking the ads
- mococa 5d agoOfc… nobody surf on internet anymore.
- celine_yu 5d agoprobably needs to do tracking, and optimize through goal setting
- ransom1538 5d agoThose are rookie numbers. The other 39% are just too good for you to catch.
- kwhitlock 5d agoGoogle Ads sells you the traffic and AdMob bans you for receiving it. The left hand bills you, the right hand punishes you, and neither talks.
- OptionX 5d agoThat's a lot of telemetry for a puzzle game.
- theholygrail 5d ago[flagged]
- nirmeetimthebes 5d ago[dead]
- diwash007 5d agoI too had similar experience. People were farming ads ... most of the conversions were a waste.
- kabes 5d agoThe article summary says:how a bot farm gets paid" But that's not in the article and I don't get it: what's in it for these bot networks, how do they get paid?
- MyMemoryfails 5d agoMy guess is they own accounts which show the ads, so they get paid for showing ads. This is similar how those "get free money" apps work, they own Ad account and get paid when you view/click that ad. Another theory is since lots free games have where you can earn in-game currency for viewing ads, the bot farms might be abusing this method.
- 0trip 5d agoexactly! the article fails to provide any non-obvious behavior of Google Ads
- nikanj 5d agoI host a page, put google ads on it, hire you to generate bot clicks on said ads. Google pays me, I pay you. Some poor sucker somewhere pays google.
- karim79 5d agoThis fucking click economy is for what, really?
- kimi 5d agoWe 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 that this is systemic, and basically it's the very business model. I remember the first account explaining how the initial budget should be a few thousand dollars, so that "the AI could target effectively". It did target effectively - our wallet.
- chrisjj 5d ago> When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. He was probably busy clicking ads...
- deleted 5d ago[deleted]
- carlosjobim 5d agoDid you also give $100 to the guy at the bus station asking for fare to get home?
- phoghed 5d agoHow is that in any way equivalent to and ad buy on Reddit?
- carlosjobim 5d agoBecause it's an obvious scam, just like buying ads on Reddit.
- kimi 5d agoI 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.
- smingo 5d agoGoogle's code of conduct used to be Don't be evil. It was there in Google's IPO prospectus, but dropped subsequently. pparently there have been lawsuits by former employees against Google over thie mott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
- 0trip 5d agomost people here bothered about why did 100 clicks show no activity. I have built 10+ products, and played a little with meta/google/linkedin ads and SEO to know that it takes atleast 5000+ clicks for any meanignful pattern to appear. 1k-5k is a scratch, 5k-50k is a tiny traction, 50k-100k is a signal, 100k-1M means retirement.
- zicohacks 5d agoDid you dispute the charge with your card issuer? If you can document that 60% of installs were not human, you may have a decent chargeback case
- mitxela 5d agoMaybe. This is probably the sort of thing the card issuer can't adjudicate, and needs an actual lawsuit.
- Oras 5d agoReading all the comments, it seems quite bleak to advertise. How do indies and SMBs reach audience these days then?
- thomasmarcelis 5d agoInfluencers sometimes have very niche / local audiences
- somenameforme 5d agoWord of mouth. Make things that work well, people want, and stand out - and they will spread by themselves. I block 100% of advertising on all platforms I use, yet somehow never have difficulty finding things when I want to find them. And that often includes stuff from very small providers. Search + reviews, and so on are a million times more useful than advertising. And getting a hundred or so early users/testers/etc to seed those reviews/etc is trivial in modern digital times. The world itself would almost certainly be a much better place without large scale/centralized advertising. I think the argument about it providing product discovery for hidden gems is nonsense. In reality it's mostly just crap, artificial demand creation, and behemoths trying to maintain brand image.
- Oras 5d agoBut even reviews are fake now. 2 years ago I launched a service and added trust pilot to collect some reviews to help with SEO, then received many emails promising “verified” reviews for $x per review. Same for Google reviews. I’m a software engineer, and the way I find new tools is usually YouTube, GitHub, and HN. Even those channels are manipulated now with bots to inflate numbers to reach more
- somenameforme 5d agoYeah that will definitely be a growing problem, especially in the era of LLMs. Services where reviews can only be provided after purchase and it specifies if the product was returned (as Steam does) can help, but LLMs do seem set to make a complete mess of the digital world across many domains.
- sspiff 5d agoCan someone explain to me why such farms exist? Who benefits, other than Google? The farm doesn't gain anything, the only thing it does is waste the advertisers money? What's the play for the farm operator?
- superjan 5d agoThe farm also runs the website that gets paid for ads. Google notices that the site triggers a conversion, so they will get the same ad again… It might be more involved but this is a large part of it.
- tcfhgj 5d agoI don't feels sorry for people shoving or paying to shove ads in peoples faces.
- mintflow 5d agoGiven this and the now saturated App market with accelerated with Agentic coding Sometimes I am wondering the low acquisition rate still pay off
- jwr 5d agoEvery ad system I tried resulted in nearly 100% bot traffic to my site. Google and LinkedIn give you "tools" that will show you various numbers, but I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I didn't trust their numbers. I decided to stop burning money on these ad systems. I'm not sure if they work for anyone at this point, I'm guessing this is more of everybody being convinced they might work and trying to get them to work, rather than ads actually resulting in conversions. Well, I guess this might be different if you are an online casino or something similar.
- sumandebnath944 5d ago[flagged]
- neom 5d agoI've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In January I was helping a friend with some of his GTM efforts, we ran $10k over 3 weeks on meta, google, linkedin and X. On Meta, google and X the sub 1 second bounce rate was around 0.7% and hotjar+raw server logs registered zero activity on 99% of the inbound from those platforms, this was to a multitude of ICP specific landing pages with highly targeted ads AND relatively general targeting to the homepage. LinkedIn does still work, but it has gotten extremely expensive.
- brazukadev 5d agoads have gone so wild I'm afraid this post might be a targeted ad for LinkedIn
- Nemo_bis 5d agoI always like to link an AdContrarian post https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-logic-of-ad-fraud.html https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-lo...
- neom 5d agoGood read. If you put mixpanel+hotjar or something like that in and actually drill down into what the networks are sending you the discrepancies are often stark. A couple years back I was working on a campaign for someone and over a month X reported it had sent ~$30k in traffic, but on our side the analysis platforms showed we'd only gotten around $2k of inbound (never mind the quality), we reported it to x and a few weeks later they came back and said there was a "bug" in the ads platform and refunded us the $30k but at the time I thought...if someone unsophisticated was running ads, they'd be out whatever they spent, to a degree their own fault for not being on top of it as ads platforms are somewhat notorious for this kinda thing but never the less, not ideal. I'm pretty sure the only useful places to advertise online these days are LinkedIn and Instagram.
- Roark66 5d agoGoogle ads make absolutely no sense financially. Even for high value items. I recently bought some ads in hope very specific terms that see almost no search traffic will be cheaper (we're talking few hundred searches a month from whole of EU). Google wanted £1.5 per click through. When I set a reasonable cost (0.1£) I got either nothing or generic keywords (which I added as a test). I'm pretty sure no one is actually bidding on these niche keywords as there are no ads shown on them ever. Google simply decides not to sell unless you pay an exorbitant amount.
- cube00 5d agoIt's somehow very expensive even for keywords that have no current ads so you're not in a real bidding marketplace.
- Nc67 5d ago60% is insane. paid traffic means nothing if you can't tell real users from bots.
- run-good-code 5d agoIt doesn't really look worth the price.
- chrisjj 5d ago> the campaign’s goal is now “won a puzzle” instead of “opened the app”. So, a CAPTCHA!
- shevy-java 5d agoWhy do you make Google stronger by giving it money? I don't disagree that these findings may be useful for other users, who can now look more at suspicious bot behaviour - but all of that money empowers Evil. Let's not let Google off the hook. Remember why they went against ublock origin. They want people to use of ads, so you ultimately contribute to evil harassment via such pester-ads that further sustain Google's de-facto monopoly. This is bad from A to Z.
- vincentabolarin 5d ago[dead]
- itintheory 5d agoHow does the bot farm profit? Did I miss it in the article somehow?
- prepend 5d agoWho does this benefit other than Google? How does a bot farm make money off this?
- mattmaroon 5d agoThey host the ads. They have some app and integrate Google’s ads in it, then click the ads with the boy network in their app.
- mschuetz 5d agoI'm generally suspicious of the effectiveness of ads. It always amuses me when Ibbuy something, and then I start getting ads for the thing I already bought.
- nikanj 5d agoSmart people everywhere are convinced that neither propaganda nor advertisement works on them. Wrong on both counts
- Tristache 5d ago[flagged]
- jokoon 5d agoI'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.
- ezconnect 5d agoAds is just a tiny part of Marketing.
- mococa 5d agoI 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.
- Bombthecat 5d agoOnly? In think that's actually not too bad. Could be worse
- hassleblad23 5d agoWe had the same experience with our google ads across multiple campaigns. Tried everything from increasing the tCPA and daily limits significantly, to creating campaigns in 1st world countries only. Around 80% of the installs just opened the app and closed it after few seconds without performing a single action, not even a tap! Google does not give you a detailed breakdown of where all the ad was shown within Google's services. They do give a breakdown of the 3rd party websites and apps where the ads ran and they are all terrible shorts drama and html5 games websites for me - some of them even had the same UI with different URLs! Shame. Ideally I would like my app's ad to be placed in the Play Store only, but Google doesn't allow this control conviniently. Next I am going to try using in-app actions for conversion instead of install, but I doubt it will be helpful at all.
- stjadams 5d agoIf your app is monetized, you might try pushing purchases as conversions. Obviously you’d adjust your tCPA to account for the higher CPA value.
- varispeed 5d agoMy story from Facebook ages ago. I was getting healthy organic traffic from Facebook. Thought maybe if I buy ads, I'll get even more? I bought ads and indeed traffic improved. Then I thought the organic traffic I had was enough so I stopped buying ads. Guess what happened? Organic traffic from Facebook tanked and never recovered. From there on I decided to never buy any ads.
- youngpabl0 5d agoDoesnt title mean you need to spend 60% of budget on installations from bot to just cut the middleman?)
- understandaidev 4d ago[dead]
- chlous 4d agoYes, I really see that there are a lot of weird installs from Google Ads. What I tried to do is to remove a lot of unclear countries to get a better quality.