10 ms·

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

61 points by lstepanek 3y ago

lstepanek 3y ago
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...
- ronsor 3y ago
  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.
  - csours 3y ago
    The internet isn't just competitive, it's a combat zone.
  - robotnikman 3y ago
    I think only huge advertisers who spend at least tens or hundreds of millions are treated well. Everyone else is just small fry to them.
  - foreign_legion 3y ago
    Maybe Google doesn’t really want anyone advertising on its platform because all its revenue is faked. The whole thing is a darpa nsa information vacuuming operation.
  - foreign_legion 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - hibikir 3y ago
    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.
- steve918 3y ago
  Facebook ads are like 90% scams. I don't even understand how any of them get accepted. It's also night and day difference from Instagram which is also owned by Meta, I don't get it.
  - nicce 3y ago
    Instagram is probably their most important site. All the big names are there and using it. It damages the brand more if there is something unsuitable.
- njovin 3y ago
  As a coder with a side hustle, I tried using FB ads a few years back. I had a niche product targeting a very specific demographic (K-12 teachers in the US). My business' page got tons of new followers from people not in education and not in the US. We spent hundreds of dollars and didn't get a single valid customer that I'm aware of. I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business. I have similar views. Large companies with marketing/advertising budgets have to spend that money. If you're in that department, you have to be able to show people how effective you are. Digital ads make that super easy with all of the nice little graphs and charts. The only problem is, their is no way of actually knowing their accuracy. They just look impressive. The fact that we have brand awareness campaigns vs promoting specific products just shows that the only metric they really care about is how much money they can spend while FB/Googs gladly take it all.
    - lstepanek 3y ago
      I agree. When running my Google Campaign, I noticed on a Thursday that my total impression count for the month had actually gone down since the day before. And my campaign had launched that Monday midway through the month so it wasn't a 30 day cutoff that explained the total impression count for the month going down. I think the impression counts are calculated using a finger to the air...
- matsemann 3y ago
  I've tried to run facebook ads for a non-profit lately, and damn they make it hard to give them money. It might be that our "page" is in a weird state, but it's just impossible to figure out how to set things up. Like, there are so many portals. Ad stuff in facebook itself, the adsmanager web page, the facebook business page. And they all look different based on if you're acting on behalf of yourself or your "page". And some things you can only do on one of those three sites, and only if acting as the correct user. And you have to constantly switch between them to get anything done. Add a spending account on your private profile (for some reason..), then verify as your page, then submit ID as yourself, then create the ad as your page, then have it not be verified but only show in one of the three sites the button on how to fix it etc etc. Just insane. If I weren't technical and stubborn I would never have figured it out. No idea how small businesses can give them money and not outright be scammed.
nitwit005 3y ago
> expanded my audience to all first world countries, and got way more clicks, especially in India, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica and Argentina. I guess not a lot of companies pay for ads in those countries, so there's less competition for clicks? Who knows. Seems just as likely they located the click fraud.
- vkou 3y ago
  It's quite possible. Given that the author also seems to not understand what impressions are... > I quickly learned that Google Ads has a minimum spend they’ll charge you just for impressions. So they put my ads on a bunch of websites no one ever goes to and charged me $50/day for it. Ugh. (If nobody visits the website, you wouldn't be paying for impressions. The author's getting impressions, people are going to that website, people are seeing the ad, the website gets paid by Google for that ad space, it's just that none of them care about clicking on the ad.) ... I think this is more of an example of 'I've bought a $5,000 oscilloscope, and I'm using it to hammer screws.' People definitely use oscilloscopes (and ad campaigns) to do profitable things, but as any non-trivial tool, it takes time, effort, and education to learn. For a tiny business, that time, effort, and money may or may not be worth it. The author's other problem is that their business (A plugin for gmail) is kind of adjacent to a lot of really shady spyware/malware/etc. Ironically, when that spyware appears in ads, people on this forum then poo-poo the ad network for allowing harmful crap to be advertised...
konschubert 3y ago
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-computers.com/products/invisible-calendar https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...
- bombcar 3y ago
  You’re probably better off shipping free hardware to appropriate bloggers, etc rather than burning cash at the altar of Google.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    yes. That's what I will probably try.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I'm partial to https://www.sevarg.net https://www.sevarg.net myself; it's not me but he may be interested.
- icelancer 3y ago
  I clicked through to see what got you banned and I gotta be honest, this product looks pretty good! Just wanted to note that.
- junon 3y ago
  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.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    In terms of openness, there is this: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image-url-manual.html https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image... and this: https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/main/HowToBuildAnApp.md 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 CE certification. Unfortunately, my dear home country of Germany isn't a very friendly place for small hardware boostrappers. :P EDIT: I created a google form. When it is available in Europe, I will notify anyone who leaves their email: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9 https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mvdtnz 3y ago
With such wildly differing titles between the article title and the Hacker News title I think this is just outrage bait.
- somedude895 3y ago
  Yeah the getting banned from Google Ads is really just a side note to the whole web projects story. The author also isn't very knowledgeable when it comes to Google Ads to begin with, so it's indeed very clickbaity.
6510 3y ago
In conclusion: No one online build a good promotional platform. Google is the least terrible, Zuck second, a large empty void in front and a smaller one behind.
clowd 3y ago
> “If you want to build something people will use, don’t build anything,” he said. “Build an ad and see if people click it. Then only build something once it gets a lot of clicks.” Well no wonder your Google ads keep getting banned.
jimrandomh 3y ago
Browser plugins that access your email are a very-high-risk category for malware, so much so that if I see an ad for one I wouldn't personally give it the benefit of the doubt. Combine that with A/B testing for different product ideas, and the clickthrough experience not actually ending in a plugin which can be malware-scanned, and rejecting it under the "circumventing systems policy" seems correct to me. The reviewer can't distinguish between "the plugin was not served because this is a fake test for a product that doesn't exist", and "the plugin was not served because the malware doesn't want to send a sample of itself to the reviewer".
- lstepanek 3y ago
  Ah, now I realize where the Malicious Software ban was coming from -- as you say, there was no plugin that could actually be malware-scanned. Makes sense. Thanks for the (perhaps obvious but not to me) insight.
SilkRoadie 3y ago
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.
- lstepanek 3y ago
  Good point about those countries not being my target market, and sure an Outlook plugin would probably make me more money. I'm new to marketing so was grasping at straws as I ran this Google Ads campaign. If you know a better way to market to actual businesses, I'm all ears.
Hizonner 3y ago
So it turns out that advertising a product you don't have as "market research" is dishonest and scummy, and SHOULD result in a permaban from the platform.
drdaeman 3y ago
> When I launched my bare minimum campaigns using the default settings, I got absolutely no ad clicks. And yes, I even used the Performance Max campaign type which claims to use AI. Yet another proof that all this Big Data that large corporations are supposedly have on us is very low value at best. There's just this meme/myth that it's all-powerful and can do magic like predicting people wishes before they even know, when in reality best it can do is maybe slightly improve results by some statistically significant but practically unimpressive margin (or not do anything at all).

61 points by lstepanek 3y ago

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...

ronsor 3y ago
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.
- csours 3y ago
  The internet isn't just competitive, it's a combat zone.
- robotnikman 3y ago
  I think only huge advertisers who spend at least tens or hundreds of millions are treated well. Everyone else is just small fry to them.
- foreign_legion 3y ago
  Maybe Google doesn’t really want anyone advertising on its platform because all its revenue is faked. The whole thing is a darpa nsa information vacuuming operation.
- foreign_legion 3y ago
  [flagged]
- hibikir 3y ago
  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.
steve918 3y ago
Facebook ads are like 90% scams. I don't even understand how any of them get accepted. It's also night and day difference from Instagram which is also owned by Meta, I don't get it.
- nicce 3y ago
  Instagram is probably their most important site. All the big names are there and using it. It damages the brand more if there is something unsuitable.
njovin 3y ago
As a coder with a side hustle, I tried using FB ads a few years back. I had a niche product targeting a very specific demographic (K-12 teachers in the US). My business' page got tons of new followers from people not in education and not in the US. We spent hundreds of dollars and didn't get a single valid customer that I'm aware of. I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >I don't think FB is any better than Google, but I also think online ads mostly exist to keep marketers in business. I have similar views. Large companies with marketing/advertising budgets have to spend that money. If you're in that department, you have to be able to show people how effective you are. Digital ads make that super easy with all of the nice little graphs and charts. The only problem is, their is no way of actually knowing their accuracy. They just look impressive. The fact that we have brand awareness campaigns vs promoting specific products just shows that the only metric they really care about is how much money they can spend while FB/Googs gladly take it all.
  - lstepanek 3y ago
    I agree. When running my Google Campaign, I noticed on a Thursday that my total impression count for the month had actually gone down since the day before. And my campaign had launched that Monday midway through the month so it wasn't a 30 day cutoff that explained the total impression count for the month going down. I think the impression counts are calculated using a finger to the air...
matsemann 3y ago
I've tried to run facebook ads for a non-profit lately, and damn they make it hard to give them money. It might be that our "page" is in a weird state, but it's just impossible to figure out how to set things up. Like, there are so many portals. Ad stuff in facebook itself, the adsmanager web page, the facebook business page. And they all look different based on if you're acting on behalf of yourself or your "page". And some things you can only do on one of those three sites, and only if acting as the correct user. And you have to constantly switch between them to get anything done. Add a spending account on your private profile (for some reason..), then verify as your page, then submit ID as yourself, then create the ad as your page, then have it not be verified but only show in one of the three sites the button on how to fix it etc etc. Just insane. If I weren't technical and stubborn I would never have figured it out. No idea how small businesses can give them money and not outright be scammed.

nitwit005 3y ago

> expanded my audience to all first world countries, and got way more clicks, especially in India, Kazakhstan, Costa Rica and Argentina. I guess not a lot of companies pay for ads in those countries, so there's less competition for clicks? Who knows. Seems just as likely they located the click fraud.

vkou 3y ago
It's quite possible. Given that the author also seems to not understand what impressions are... > I quickly learned that Google Ads has a minimum spend they’ll charge you just for impressions. So they put my ads on a bunch of websites no one ever goes to and charged me $50/day for it. Ugh. (If nobody visits the website, you wouldn't be paying for impressions. The author's getting impressions, people are going to that website, people are seeing the ad, the website gets paid by Google for that ad space, it's just that none of them care about clicking on the ad.) ... I think this is more of an example of 'I've bought a $5,000 oscilloscope, and I'm using it to hammer screws.' People definitely use oscilloscopes (and ad campaigns) to do profitable things, but as any non-trivial tool, it takes time, effort, and education to learn. For a tiny business, that time, effort, and money may or may not be worth it. The author's other problem is that their business (A plugin for gmail) is kind of adjacent to a lot of really shady spyware/malware/etc. Ironically, when that spyware appears in ads, people on this forum then poo-poo the ad network for allowing harmful crap to be advertised...

konschubert 3y ago

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-computers.com/products/invisible-calendar https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

bombcar 3y ago
You’re probably better off shipping free hardware to appropriate bloggers, etc rather than burning cash at the altar of Google.
- konschubert 3y ago
  yes. That's what I will probably try.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I'm partial to https://www.sevarg.net https://www.sevarg.net myself; it's not me but he may be interested.
icelancer 3y ago
I clicked through to see what got you banned and I gotta be honest, this product looks pretty good! Just wanted to note that.
junon 3y ago
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.
- konschubert 3y ago
  In terms of openness, there is this: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image-url-manual.html https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image... and this: https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/main/HowToBuildAnApp.md 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 CE certification. Unfortunately, my dear home country of Germany isn't a very friendly place for small hardware boostrappers. :P EDIT: I created a google form. When it is available in Europe, I will notify anyone who leaves their email: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9 https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mvdtnz 3y ago

With such wildly differing titles between the article title and the Hacker News title I think this is just outrage bait.

somedude895 3y ago
Yeah the getting banned from Google Ads is really just a side note to the whole web projects story. The author also isn't very knowledgeable when it comes to Google Ads to begin with, so it's indeed very clickbaity.

6510 3y ago

In conclusion: No one online build a good promotional platform. Google is the least terrible, Zuck second, a large empty void in front and a smaller one behind.

clowd 3y ago

> “If you want to build something people will use, don’t build anything,” he said. “Build an ad and see if people click it. Then only build something once it gets a lot of clicks.” Well no wonder your Google ads keep getting banned.

jimrandomh 3y ago

Browser plugins that access your email are a very-high-risk category for malware, so much so that if I see an ad for one I wouldn't personally give it the benefit of the doubt. Combine that with A/B testing for different product ideas, and the clickthrough experience not actually ending in a plugin which can be malware-scanned, and rejecting it under the "circumventing systems policy" seems correct to me. The reviewer can't distinguish between "the plugin was not served because this is a fake test for a product that doesn't exist", and "the plugin was not served because the malware doesn't want to send a sample of itself to the reviewer".

lstepanek 3y ago
Ah, now I realize where the Malicious Software ban was coming from -- as you say, there was no plugin that could actually be malware-scanned. Makes sense. Thanks for the (perhaps obvious but not to me) insight.

SilkRoadie 3y ago

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.

lstepanek 3y ago
Good point about those countries not being my target market, and sure an Outlook plugin would probably make me more money. I'm new to marketing so was grasping at straws as I ran this Google Ads campaign. If you know a better way to market to actual businesses, I'm all ears.

Hizonner 3y ago

So it turns out that advertising a product you don't have as "market research" is dishonest and scummy, and SHOULD result in a permaban from the platform.

drdaeman 3y ago

> When I launched my bare minimum campaigns using the default settings, I got absolutely no ad clicks. And yes, I even used the Performance Max campaign type which claims to use AI. Yet another proof that all this Big Data that large corporations are supposedly have on us is very low value at best. There's just this meme/myth that it's all-powerful and can do magic like predicting people wishes before they even know, when in reality best it can do is maybe slightly improve results by some statistically significant but practically unimpressive margin (or not do anything at all).