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Maybe a significant proportion of the clicks you got were from click farms or bots, who were working for the benfit of the site hosting the ads (and incidentall

Maybe a significant proportion of the clicks you got were from click farms or bots, who were working for the benfit of the site hosting the ads (and incidentally making lots of money for Google)? I have had much better results with Search ads.

Silhouette 12y ago
Maybe a significant proportion of the clicks you got were from click farms or bots Given the obvious keyword spam I mentioned on one of the top referring sites, that wouldn't surprise me at all. But again, if Google are that bad at dealing with fraudulent clicks, we're going to make that their problem rather than ours! I have had much better results with Search ads. Google search ads are actually our second worst-performing experiment by some way as far as on-line channels go. However, in fairness to Google, we already rank on the first page for almost all the targeted terms in our current strategy anyway, so it is entirely possible that any keywords generic enough to be useful on top of that are also broad enough to be the wrong scale for our needs. A more interesting contrast for us is the results from advertising say via Facebook (targeting similar interests/demographics) or via individual ads we've placed directly with a few established sites relevant to our target audience. Those channels should be directly comparable to GDN, yet all of them have consistently performed vastly better.
- hermitcrab 12y ago
  Have you check the 'Dimensions>Search terms' report to check the phrases your ads appear for (which won't be the same as those you bid on, unless you are only using exact match) are well targetted? Another common mistake I have seen is to advertise expensive English-language products to people not searching in English in poor countries. It is so easy to make mistakes in AdWords.
  - Silhouette 12y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't think anything like that could explain our poor results specifically with Google. We did keep an eye on the actual terms in the search ads and knock out a couple of genuinely related things that aren't any good for this specific site, and similarly we started looking at manually removing bad placements with the GDN ads until it became obvious that it was futile. Also, all the ads were targeted by country (and similarly for the other channels I mentioned, where applicable) so again there's no reason performance on Google should have been so much worse than every other on-line channel we use. I've just noticed that Google e-mailed us with a phone number we could call for "free support and advice from an AdWords expert". Might be good for a laugh (or a refund, not that we let them near very much money anyway).
    - hermitcrab 12y ago
      I have heard from others that the quality of advice from their AdWords 'experts' is very variable. So I would be skeptical about whatever they suggest.

Silhouette 12y ago

Maybe a significant proportion of the clicks you got were from click farms or bots Given the obvious keyword spam I mentioned on one of the top referring sites, that wouldn't surprise me at all. But again, if Google are that bad at dealing with fraudulent clicks, we're going to make that their problem rather than ours! I have had much better results with Search ads. Google search ads are actually our second worst-performing experiment by some way as far as on-line channels go. However, in fairness to Google, we already rank on the first page for almost all the targeted terms in our current strategy anyway, so it is entirely possible that any keywords generic enough to be useful on top of that are also broad enough to be the wrong scale for our needs. A more interesting contrast for us is the results from advertising say via Facebook (targeting similar interests/demographics) or via individual ads we've placed directly with a few established sites relevant to our target audience. Those channels should be directly comparable to GDN, yet all of them have consistently performed vastly better.

hermitcrab 12y ago
Have you check the 'Dimensions>Search terms' report to check the phrases your ads appear for (which won't be the same as those you bid on, unless you are only using exact match) are well targetted? Another common mistake I have seen is to advertise expensive English-language products to people not searching in English in poor countries. It is so easy to make mistakes in AdWords.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't think anything like that could explain our poor results specifically with Google. We did keep an eye on the actual terms in the search ads and knock out a couple of genuinely related things that aren't any good for this specific site, and similarly we started looking at manually removing bad placements with the GDN ads until it became obvious that it was futile. Also, all the ads were targeted by country (and similarly for the other channels I mentioned, where applicable) so again there's no reason performance on Google should have been so much worse than every other on-line channel we use. I've just noticed that Google e-mailed us with a phone number we could call for "free support and advice from an AdWords expert". Might be good for a laugh (or a refund, not that we let them near very much money anyway).
  - hermitcrab 12y ago
    I have heard from others that the quality of advice from their AdWords 'experts' is very variable. So I would be skeptical about whatever they suggest.