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I tried Adwords for search again recently after several years. There was a decent number of clicks, and the cost per "action" seemed very reasonable, where for
by JeffL 6y ago
I tried Adwords for search again recently after several years. There was a decent number of clicks, and the cost per "action" seemed very reasonable, where for me, the action is clicking on the download link from the landing page to download the installer for our game. The only problem is that tracking the IP's, 90% of the traffic from Adwords that downloaded the installer never actually ran the installer. Organic traffic usually has much more than 50% of the people who download it, run it. Is it a bunch of robots driving clicks and then clicking randomly on links on the landing page? Seems really suspicious.
- FpUser 6y agoSame here. Found Adwords totally useless ROI-wise
- dsun179 6y agoSame here. Legend says your clicks become cheaper after spending $6M.
- jansan 6y agoThey don't. I spent around $2M from 2003 to 2015 and clicks became steadily more expensive and useless. The advice from their "experts" usually resulted in more spending with lower ROI. Eventually we stopped using Adwords. Google obviously didn't even notice or they just didn't give a shit, as they never contacted us to ask why we stopped using AdWords. You cannot imagine how great AdWords was in 2004. It was much more transparent and easier to use, and the ROI was just incredible. Their success at that time was more than justified. Not so sure about today, though.
- JeffL 6y agoYeah, in 2004, I could get a new paying user from Adwords for $35. Since about 2007+, the cost seems roughly infinite no matter how I try to tweak it.
- TAForObvReasons 6y agois that an indictment of adwords or the state of the browser ecosystem (where potential customers are running ad blockers or otherwise avoiding ads)?
- Nextgrid 6y agoIt could very well be that real users are disregarding ads (either with technical solutions such as blockers or by just ignoring them) and fraud has picked up the slack so that overall the number of clicks hasn't changed but the ratio of real user to fraudulent user has changed significantly.
- stevespang 6y agoNever trusting Google, I always used prepaid credit cards to fund my adwords purchasing. When Google finally caught wind of this, and could not just run wild with a "real" credit card like other horror stories I read - - they sent me a notice saying no more prepaid cards. So I said, see ya later Google Adwords, and guess what, even without any ads I have the same gross revenue, but without the expense of Adwords.
- malwarebytess 6y agoBut excellent for affiliate link abuse. :]
- wodenokoto 6y agoHow many steps are there between clicking the ad and downloading? Don’t underestimate fat-fingering
- JeffL 6y agoThe only prominent thing to click on from the landing page is the download link, and the ads are only showing to desktop users.
- raverbashing 6y agoWebscrapers maybe?
- dx034 6y agoMaybe people don't know how to open it? Some websites exactly show users where to find the download afterwards. With Firefox, downloads pretty much disappear. In Chrome they're a bit more visible but easy to overlook. You could also trigger false positives with antivirus software preventing users to open it. There are a lot of reasons why users might click download but don't install or run the software in the end.
- 101404 6y agoDo people still download "setup.exe" files from random sites on the Internet and run them on their PCs? Maybe a link to some sort of "app store" (or whatever its called on Windows) would be more convincing?
- invalidOrTaken 6y ago...yes. (I should probably change my ways.)
- winkeltripel 6y ago(Microsoft could allow the store to be less terrible)
- anchpop 6y agoWhat's terrible about the store?
- mchristen 6y agoTo answer your first question, yes, quite a bit.
- Aaronstotle 6y agoYes, the Windows store is pretty awful and I feel like most Windows users have been installing software this way for a while (myself included). I believe all of my current software besides games were installed this way.
- Negitivefrags 6y agoNot throwing away 30% of your revenue is a pretty good reason to still allow people to download your product from a website.
- taneq 6y agoYes, because there's no real choice. Only installing from an app store adds a little protection, but not much. The fundamental issue is the design of desktop OS' security models, which are focused around protecting local users from other local users, not around protecting local users from untrusted software. (More than happy to hear suggestions for easy-to-use sandboxing for desktop software. The whole situation makes me quite uncomfortable.)
- LunaSea 6y agoIf you still have the (anonymised) IP addresses I can tell you if the downloads was coming from bots or not.
- martindevans 6y agoHow can you anonymise an IP address? Given that (as I understand it) an IP address is considered personally identifying information under GDPR.
- sdenton4 6y agoImagine you walk into a grocery store and pick up a rewards card to save N%. To get it, you have to give a phone number. If you write down your phone number, you've handed over some PII. If you write down a fake number, it's still legally PII, but has been anonymized, so the store won't be able to find you.
- martindevans 6y agoThe original comments was about detecting if a given IP is a bot or not - I assume they probably can't do that given 32 random bits!
- ruialmeida 6y agoGoogle Analytics can do this by setting the last octet of IPv4 addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros. Reference: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
- nabeards 6y agoI thought this wasn’t true unless you had other data to aid in linking the IP address directly to the person (in http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=184668&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=1116945 http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...). So unless you have additional identifiers, an IP address by itself isn’t enough.
- ryanSrich 6y agoOnly time I’ve ever used AdWords we got a lot of sign ups, but all from very random Gmail accounts. They were all bots. I either don’t get how AdWords works or it’s entirely useless for SaaS businesses.
- nmfisher 6y agoI had exactly the same experience the handful of times I've used AdWords. I also just released my app on the Play Store a couple of weeks ago, and had exactly the same thing within the first 48 hours - a bunch of suspiciously similar Gmail accounts, none of which had actually used the app (I know this because no backing accounts were made in the database). The only conclusion I can make is that there's huge amounts of fraud, but the average advertiser either doesn't know about it, or their advertising ROI is high enough that they can simply eat fraudulent clicks as the cost of doing business. I've said it before, though - gut feeling is that internet advertising is long overdue for a reckoning.
- dx034 6y agoSure it was bots or just people signing up with throwaway accounts to get something for free? When I don't trust a page but have to provide details I always use fake data, doesn't mean a bot has filled it out.
- leoplct 6y agoMe too. I had same experience. A lot of fake sign ups from random email.
- sida 6y agoIs it possible to track the action inside the installer itself? e.g. each install contains a unique slug, when the installer is opened you use the unique slug to know where it is coming from?
- codegladiator 6y agoYou can probably fingerprint the machine and send it back ?
- JeffL 6y agoWe temporarily track with IP addresses. When someone goes to the landing page, we temporarily record the IP address and where the traffic came from, and then if they actually run the installer within a few days, we link up the install with the source of the traffic. Edit: The installer checks our server to make sure it has the most recent version, and that's where we compare IP's.
- jwdunne 6y agoIf you can store the AdWords click ID on the server with the IP, you might be able to use your matcher to record the install as a conversion. AdWords should start optimising for installs vs downloads. But if you can carry over to some kind of in app purchase, I’d do that too, using avg value of an install as the install value and then any of the in app purchase values as the conversion values.
- robk 6y agoThink we filed a patent but it's possible to do this server side to inject a string into a payload area without affecting the integrity of the binary (can't recall how we did it but search patent search for my name at Google)
- a_imho 6y agoIs it required to communicate to users their IPs are used to track them?
- qiguai 6y agoDid you use an advertorial or a webinar to properly whet their appetite so that any task even beyond installing would have been begged for by them?
- es7 6y agoI run Google Ads for a mobile app I own. If I try to optimize for download volume, that's all I get - bots after bots. Can rack up thousands of downloads for <10 cents per download without any impact on how many users actually use or rate the app. I found that getting a good ROI required setting higher price targets and optimizing for in-app actions. That's really hard to do well and not very reliable, but it helped.
- 3princip 6y agoExcuse my ignorance, I know nothing about running these ads. How does a bot know whether you've optimized for download volume or in-app actions? I don't understand how a bot would know to download the app to fulfill your requirement? Furthermore, what is the incentive to write and operate these bots? Genuinely curious. The only party with an incentive to do this would be Google, no?
- jmckib 6y agoI was thinking the same thing, only google has an incentive to do this and it would be too risky for them, legally and to their reputation. Either this isn't happening as much as people think it is, or some third party has an unknown reason to be operating bots like this.
- jlbnjmn 6y agoCompetitors have a strong incentive to click each other's ads. Google has a strong incentive to let them.
- drenvuk 6y agoThat's false. The one area where I'm sure google doesn't mess around is with their ads division. They spend a proportionately large amount of money combating fraud to prevent erosion of confidence and most importantly accuracy in their main money maker. If you've ever taken a look at the number of conversions fb ads provides vs google ads, you'd know this.
- gas9S9zw3P9c 6y agoI've tried AdWords for a couple of projects and have had very similar experiences. It has always been a total waste of money for me and I'm having a hard time believing that it's actual people, i.e. potential customers clicking on these things. The behavior of the people coming from AdWords is always completely different from those coming through other sources, as if they just clicked on it by accident or as if they're just bots.
- joking 6y agothats entirely dependant on the volume, when you expend 6 million, you problably are going to loose a lot of money to bots, but you are going to recup the looses from other clients. When you expend very little money, the bots can easily get all the budget.
- ghufran_syed 6y agoMaybe I don't understand how ads work, but this sounds like "lose money on each sale but we make it up with volume"...
- idunno246 6y agomore like lose money on most but make up for it later. bots are just an unfortunate fact you have to amortize into your costs. Let's say you see 75% bot traffic. You make $10 per actual user. If youre spending $2 per action with 4 actions, you burn $6(75%) on bots, $2(25%) on a real user($8 total), and get $10 - netting $2. So you're making money, but wasting more. So, let's say you set your targeting to completely exclude the bots. Great, you spent $2 and made $10, netting $8. The problem though is you ruled out 90% of your traffic - you have false positives on whether its a bot so you exclude legit users(all of this targeting is fuzzy rule based). You can 10x the traffic with bots, making $20, but you cant 10x the perfect targeting, so youre stuck with $8.
- flatTheCurve 6y agoThinking the same is true for Facebook ads. Got a bunch of phone numbers that wanted our service. Only 1 person was interested, but didn't sign up.
- Spooky23 6y agoFor a nonprofit entity that I am affiliated with, we had a very high engagement (free) Facebook presence that eroded over time as organic posts get crowded out. So you end up boosting or wasting money on ads. In my (limited) experience, ads weren't effective for us as they were too local and the audience was limited. Boosts were effective but expensive. The funny thing was the our highest conversion paid event advertising was the old fashioned newspaper.
- capkutay 6y agoTry adding more good friction to your user acquisition funnel. If someone really wants to try your game, have them sign up with a valid email. It seems counter-intuitive 'Why would I add more work for people who want to use my product?' - but the truth is you're just creating more work and wasting resources qualifying poor leads (in your case bots).
- lancesells 6y agoAgreed. It's should be about the quality of leads not the quantity. I've seen it happen with Facebook Lead Ads where those are almost worthless because of the ease to sign up.
- colechristensen 6y agoThere's always invisible recaptcha, which does nothing unless it has a high suspicion of being a bit.
- nullc 6y agoInvisible recaptcha silently and randomly breaks your page for prudent users who run umatrix to cut down on tracking/spyware/malware garbage.
- slivanes 6y agoBut I would think they would not have seen the ad in the first place?
- colechristensen 6y agoYeah, it's something that would only need to be put on the landing page for the ad, not elsewhere (until you're worried about bots creating accounts on your platform for other reasons)
- z3t4 6y agoI've had issues with ads on Adwords, where 99% of the clicks where from bots. However, 50% engagement after a signup or download is normal! For some reason users signup or download stuff without thinking, like an web reflex of some sort. Sadly 50% of people will have no idea what to do after signing up or downloading. You can however get this number up to 90% if you have a simple, clear and easy instructions what to do after downloading it!
- ethbro 6y agoI would not be surprised if > 10% of people are unable to figure out where they downloaded it. The Downloads folder is a scourge that never should have been allowed to exist. Where should something be after I request it be moved to my machine? On the default view! (Aka Desktop) Why? Because I literally just interacted with it!
- phreack 6y agoSeriously. I have yet to find a non-techie user whose Downloads folder is not a complete mess, and why would they even know to organize it, it's so hidden from regular view. Many would just re-download things they might have already downloaded.
- tempestn 6y agoWhy would you need to organize your downloads folder? I just leave everything I download there until I have a reason to clear it (like low disk space, reinstalling the OS, upgrading the drive, etc.) Unless I'm down loading a file that I want to move somewhere else of course. But installers and things that get downloaded to print and all kinds of things like that just stay in the DL folder because why not.
- justanotherc 6y agoJust imagine the complete mess their Desktop would be if the OS sent downloads there, lol.
- 6y ago
- rsp1984 6y agoSorry for my ignorance, but wouldn't that be an indication of, you know, fraud? And if it were, would it even matter if it were Google's bots or someone else's? I never really understood how Google could ever guarantee that ad clicks are real and not fake, as any sufficiently sophisticated robot will have click patterns that are indistinguishable from humans. I bet designing such sophisticated robots is an industry on its own.
- alexpetralia 6y agoI suspect this would be easily gamed by careful experimenters. For example, could you build a page that bots could navigate to, but would be really obscure for a person? Would that generate a substantial amount of clicks? Sure, the bots could adapt (i.e. not click on obscure pages), but that would take time to learn, and until then, they would screw up and fall into the honeypot. If that has ever happened in the history of Google, you'd think someone would have publicized it.
- Gustomaximus 6y agoFew questions; - When you say Adwords for search, you mean google.com and not display right? I see a bunch of what you describe across the display network any would only recommend running white-listed sites if doing the latter as there is much encouragement of fat finger and kids who press anything etc here. - Are you allowing search partners? Id going google search I would strongly recommend sticking to google only as there is often more dodgy around partners but this is auto included in setup. - What kind of KW and variance: Again assuming search, who big are your KW lists and negatives? Apologies if asking the obvious but is this consistent via KW? - Geographic restriction: Have you broken the effect down geographically? This can lead to huge variance, and to a letter extent times your running. - Are the ads pushy? Google and some people will put a bunch of effort towards you getting higher click through but fight that. You need to stay withing bands but too many ads are for an off the cuff example; 'Amazing game that will blow you away" gets clicks whereas you'll perform better by setting expectation with the boring 'Download and install this game' as your headline type thing... naturally if bots it wont help. Game install can be tricky, from what I've seen it's competitive and low margin which is a challenging start point.
- JeffL 6y agoBack in 2004-ish when I was having a lot of success with Google ads, it was display ads across their partner network as well as search ads. Recently only text ads on Google.com for search, PC desktop only. It's the same big giant list of keywords I used to use, something like 200 long, which I optimized a lot at the time. Not a lot of negatives, though. USA and UK only this go around. I don't think they are pushy. Yes, I noticed in the past that honest, informative ads seem to work the best, especially since I used to do CPC, so no reason to trick people into clicking who really aren't interested. I'm sort of in a weird position where some of my metrics seem really good, monthly ARPU of $9.86 and churn 1.5%, I just can't figure out how to get people in the front door any more.
- XCSme 6y agoI had the same experience with both Adwords and Facebook ads, all clicks were from bots: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_ads_100_fake_clicks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...