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We 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 behavio

by kimi 5d ago

We 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 4d ago
  [deleted]
carlosjobim 5d ago
Did you also give $100 to the guy at the bus station asking for fare to get home?
- phoghed 5d ago
  How is that in any way equivalent to and ad buy on Reddit?
  - carlosjobim 5d ago
    Because it's an obvious scam, just like buying ads on Reddit.
    - kimi 5d ago
      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.
      - carlosjobim 4d ago
        Give affiliates 15% commission for any successful sales they make. Then you don't have to think about marketing and you don't have to throw any money into a black hole. Buying ads is always a scam.
        nucleative 4d ago
        How to get affiliates, and more importantly how to get affiliates who don't make the brand look shoddy?
        carlosjobim 4d ago
        You're asking me to write an entire book. Depends entirely on what you are selling. But the rule of thumb to get good quality partners is that you should contact them instead of the other way around. And if you know your business sector, then you know which are the people and institutions who have a lot of reach. Some industries have standardized affiliate marketing which you don't have to think about. For example booking.com for hotels or Amazon for retail. They take a percentage of each sale they make for you and that's it. You don't pay them anything except for confirmed sales. If you chose black hole paid advertising, then at a minimum you should give out different voucher codes on each channel you advertise on, which give customers a 10 or 15% discount. And give voucher codes to friends, family, colleagues and contacts that they can give to anybody they like. That's the only way to find out where the real customers are and where to target your ads.
        a123b456c 4d ago
        Have you ever heard of affiliate fraud?
      - 4d ago
tommek4077 5d ago
Same here. Most of the bots didn't even load anything besides the html, no js execution, no clicks...
- moeadham 4d ago
  I understand the mobile bot farms monetization (publish app with ads, have bot farm click on ads in your app). I don’t understand the reddit ad clicks though. How does the bot farm profit? Is there some way to earn money hosting reddit ads?
  - tommek4077 4d ago
    I dont understand either. Maybe depleting budgets of competitors?
jfil 5d ago
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.
- piker 4d ago
  Has anyone ever had any success building a digital products business with pay-per-click ads? We're always tempted and dabble, and every bit of traffic seems accidental, completely disinterested or obviously a spammer clicking around trying to collect the "conversion".
  - qingcharles 4d ago
    It's literally the quickest way to burn money. Making PPC ads work is an enormous skill and some small business deciding to throw their keywords into Google Ad Manager is a sure fire way to lose your shirt. It is very, very, very hard to make a profit off PPC.
  - jfil 3d ago
    Yes, of course people have built a successful promotion engine with PPC. But if there was a repeatable method I could describe to you then, well, I'd be a very rich man! I always recommend focusing on Sales first, and coming up with a steady, repeatable way to move people from "being aware of your product" to "deal won". With people. Manually. Only then, when you have a sales funnel that's economically viable, you can start paying to bring more people into it through PPC. As qingcharles commented, PPC is a fast easy way for big players and fraudsters to fleece you. There is a lot of domain knowledge to build on the path to effective PPC advertising. Here is one piece of practical advice: every ad network has an "opted-in by default" gotcha. Your job is to discover it before you give them a dollar. Sometimes it looks like "relax my targeting criteria for broader reach" that will bring in irrelevant visitors. Sometimes it is "also run my ads on partner sites/off network", those sites will have extreme fraud. Sometimes it looks like "automatically pick the right landing page URL to promote, so I don't have to think for myself" which will drive paid conversions to your Contact Us form.
nicholaides 4d ago
I hope Reddit is not charging advertisers per ad video play. As a mobile reddit user, I’ve noticed that the app treats ads differently than regular posts. They are more sensitive to taps than regular posts and I frequently accidentally trigger ad videos playing by scrolling past them but I never accidentally trigger regular videos.
- nicholsonpk 4d ago
  I've seen this same thing on Instagram. Scrolling normally and then all of the sudden the latest advertiser's site is open. The only interaction they get is the close button. It can't be great for figuring if you're targeting potential sales correctly.
fnord77 4d ago
when I'm bored sometimes I look up what the current high price keywords are and then search for that and click those ads
cube00 4d ago
That's assuming you can get your ad seen, plenty of times I've seen Reddit's own ads for advertising on Reddit and I'll never see my ads. So I'm bidding against Reddit on Reddit's own platform.
ksajadi 4d ago
Reddit is probably the worst of these ad platforms. We had a simple issue: we couldn't set the account that the ad was coming from to be the correct one (we have two Reddit accounts). That's it! So we sent a support email. That was the beginning of 4, 45 mins sales calls, with full Powerpoint decks and on the spot commitments from us to reach, spend, etc. At the end of each call the rep would promise us that the account issue is escalated and will be fixed before we launch the campaign and would set the time for the next call. 3 weeks in, the account issue is still not fixed and frankly I cannot trust anything they say about their metrics, impressions, CTR or anything else.

by kimi 5d ago

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 4d ago
[deleted]

carlosjobim 5d ago

Did you also give $100 to the guy at the bus station asking for fare to get home?

phoghed 5d ago
How is that in any way equivalent to and ad buy on Reddit?
- carlosjobim 5d ago
  Because it's an obvious scam, just like buying ads on Reddit.
  - kimi 5d ago
    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.
    - carlosjobim 4d ago
      Give affiliates 15% commission for any successful sales they make. Then you don't have to think about marketing and you don't have to throw any money into a black hole. Buying ads is always a scam.
      - nucleative 4d ago
        How to get affiliates, and more importantly how to get affiliates who don't make the brand look shoddy?
        carlosjobim 4d ago
        You're asking me to write an entire book. Depends entirely on what you are selling. But the rule of thumb to get good quality partners is that you should contact them instead of the other way around. And if you know your business sector, then you know which are the people and institutions who have a lot of reach. Some industries have standardized affiliate marketing which you don't have to think about. For example booking.com for hotels or Amazon for retail. They take a percentage of each sale they make for you and that's it. You don't pay them anything except for confirmed sales. If you chose black hole paid advertising, then at a minimum you should give out different voucher codes on each channel you advertise on, which give customers a 10 or 15% discount. And give voucher codes to friends, family, colleagues and contacts that they can give to anybody they like. That's the only way to find out where the real customers are and where to target your ads.
      - a123b456c 4d ago
        Have you ever heard of affiliate fraud?
    - 4d ago

tommek4077 5d ago

Same here. Most of the bots didn't even load anything besides the html, no js execution, no clicks...

moeadham 4d ago
I understand the mobile bot farms monetization (publish app with ads, have bot farm click on ads in your app). I don’t understand the reddit ad clicks though. How does the bot farm profit? Is there some way to earn money hosting reddit ads?
- tommek4077 4d ago
  I dont understand either. Maybe depleting budgets of competitors?

jfil 5d ago

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.

piker 4d ago
Has anyone ever had any success building a digital products business with pay-per-click ads? We're always tempted and dabble, and every bit of traffic seems accidental, completely disinterested or obviously a spammer clicking around trying to collect the "conversion".
- qingcharles 4d ago
  It's literally the quickest way to burn money. Making PPC ads work is an enormous skill and some small business deciding to throw their keywords into Google Ad Manager is a sure fire way to lose your shirt. It is very, very, very hard to make a profit off PPC.
- jfil 3d ago
  Yes, of course people have built a successful promotion engine with PPC. But if there was a repeatable method I could describe to you then, well, I'd be a very rich man! I always recommend focusing on Sales first, and coming up with a steady, repeatable way to move people from "being aware of your product" to "deal won". With people. Manually. Only then, when you have a sales funnel that's economically viable, you can start paying to bring more people into it through PPC. As qingcharles commented, PPC is a fast easy way for big players and fraudsters to fleece you. There is a lot of domain knowledge to build on the path to effective PPC advertising. Here is one piece of practical advice: every ad network has an "opted-in by default" gotcha. Your job is to discover it before you give them a dollar. Sometimes it looks like "relax my targeting criteria for broader reach" that will bring in irrelevant visitors. Sometimes it is "also run my ads on partner sites/off network", those sites will have extreme fraud. Sometimes it looks like "automatically pick the right landing page URL to promote, so I don't have to think for myself" which will drive paid conversions to your Contact Us form.

nicholaides 4d ago

I hope Reddit is not charging advertisers per ad video play. As a mobile reddit user, I’ve noticed that the app treats ads differently than regular posts. They are more sensitive to taps than regular posts and I frequently accidentally trigger ad videos playing by scrolling past them but I never accidentally trigger regular videos.

nicholsonpk 4d ago
I've seen this same thing on Instagram. Scrolling normally and then all of the sudden the latest advertiser's site is open. The only interaction they get is the close button. It can't be great for figuring if you're targeting potential sales correctly.

fnord77 4d ago

when I'm bored sometimes I look up what the current high price keywords are and then search for that and click those ads

cube00 4d ago

That's assuming you can get your ad seen, plenty of times I've seen Reddit's own ads for advertising on Reddit and I'll never see my ads. So I'm bidding against Reddit on Reddit's own platform.

ksajadi 4d ago

Reddit is probably the worst of these ad platforms. We had a simple issue: we couldn't set the account that the ad was coming from to be the correct one (we have two Reddit accounts). That's it! So we sent a support email. That was the beginning of 4, 45 mins sales calls, with full Powerpoint decks and on the spot commitments from us to reach, spend, etc. At the end of each call the rep would promise us that the account issue is escalated and will be fixed before we launch the campaign and would set the time for the next call. 3 weeks in, the account issue is still not fixed and frankly I cannot trust anything they say about their metrics, impressions, CTR or anything else.