When I saw the title I thought, "oh another article by someone who has no idea what they are doing complaining about advertising on X platform not working and being a waste of money.
Except I have been seeing the same thing.
Google has all of the data. They know that publisher X's inventory performs at 1/100th (or less) of the competitions. They should be smart priced accordingly, at about a penny per click.
It was initially shocking. I have used a lot of ad platform in the past (nearly) decade and Google was the only one that consistently delivered high quality traffic that was obviously real people.
Here are a few other really dirty tricks Google will play on you:
#1 If you are selling ads from the publishing side, Google will sell you your own ads by running ads on your site unless you explicitly exclude your site from every ad campaign.
#2 Engagement ads. These are video ads that play on a mouse over. They report a mouse over as a "click."
Similar to this, I noticed a pretty crappy thing Google are doing on Youtube on the ipad last night. I did a youtube search and went to tap the first result only to have it replaced with an ad just before I clicked it, taking me through to some ad.
I experimented with this a couple of times, both times I did a search, and about 0.5-1 second after the page loaded the first search result was shifted down and its position taken by an ad link that looked the same as a search result.
Similar annoying thing with video pre-roll ads on Youtube: I'm used to pausing videos by clicking on them but when the video is an ad then it opens the link of the ad instead of pausing the video.
I think google do sloppy shit whenever the "sloppiness" suits them. Take app permissions in the play store as an example; you mean to say google are so concerned by me installing unvetted apps that to do so, I have to click some check box somewhere in the settings, YET do not allow me to set app permissions on an app by app basis? That is downright sloppy, only it isn't really sloppiness, it's a state of affairs that one way or another suits their needs.
Coz think about it: even after they've seen plenty of apps asking for permissions that are none of their business, apps that they've approved seeing as they're on the app store, they still don't change their permissions policy. I call that intentional slopiness.
I am still appalled by the fact that Play Store doesn't allow users to search for apps based on requested permissions or size. It's extremely ironic, considering Google's core business.
>Take app permissions in the play store as an example; you mean to say google are so concerned by me installing unvetted apps that to do so, I have to click some check box somewhere in the settings, YET do not allow me to set app permissions on an app by app basis?
This makes sense from an API perspective. If you could disable permissions then the developer would have to check for permission every time it did something. This sounds simple but in terms of the amount of dialogs and screens and such that you have to add for every use case explodes in number.
I always thought it was really cool that apps had to request permissions up-front; that said, I much prefer the iOS approach of 'ask when it becomes necessary, and only then'.
If would only be cool if you could disable these permissions; as it is, they're not asking you if you want to grant the permissions, they're just warning you in the ways in which the app will violate your privacy. Thanks, but that's not enough.
(Unless you run Xprivacy or Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard, etc.)
Allowing users to set which of any possible 2^N subsets of these N types of permission would cause a lot of developer complication and errors, and people complaining about buggy apps, making the android platform "seem" buggy all the time.
If an app "wants to do x", where x is a defined do-able thing, then it shouldn't be too complex to say no. It's not like an app wants permission to drown my puppy in the aquarium in the living room; it wants to do things set as do-able in android. I don't see what's so complex about that. Instead of a blanket permission policy where an app fails to work because I didn't install it coz I don't like the permissions it wants, let apps fail because I denied them permissions I didn't deem necessary. An app can simply tell me it won't work unless I allow it to drown my puppy in the living room aquarium, and once I say "leave my puppy alone", it stops working and sulks away. Mind you, I'm not a developer, so I don't know what I'm talking about at a technical level. I just want to be able to say no when a flash light app wants to send sms messages. Or when a flea extermination app wants to drown my puppies.
We had a similar problem with mobile search ads. The vast majority of clicks we got were misclicks, which is very painful when you're bidding $5+ click. We fixed the issue by putting a -90% bid on mobile ads. Now once every few months someone from Google calls us and tries to convince us to remove that -90% bid, assuring us the traffic is good and will convert. Pretty sleazy.
In our account penalizing the bid for mobile ads didn't help because it looks like Google treats 'mobile' and 'tablets' separately. So we prevented ads on phones, but you can't penalize the bid for tablets so that doesn't work to prevent games on iPads.
The Google support person told me they can't tell the difference between tablets and desktops, but I don't believe that for a second. Our own analytics clearly showed the user-agent for all of the visitors was for tablets and not desktops.
The Google support person may not be fully informed, but they are provably incorrect in that claim.
Simply put, Google used to offer the ability to include/exclude devices based on desktop/tablet/mobile device types. Additionally, they offer the ability in their device segment reports in the AdWords UI to see what device did what. They have the data.
When Enhanced Campaigns were launched in the not so distant past, there was a large uproar from the paid search community (of which I consider myself apart of given my search agency background). It was very much a sense of them forcing mobile traffic despite our wishes and the negative bid modifier for mobile was something we had to push them on.
At the time, Google took the stance that tablet traffic/usage was largely indistinguishable from desktop traffic, so it shouldn't be a problem to blend those. Anyone with half a clue in this field could point out several reasons why that was false, but we were unsuccessful in getting that changed.
There have been a few changes to AdWords targeting and settings in the past couple of years that were pretty large steps back for savvy advertisers, and this was one of them.
Isn't it also the case that you can restrict your ads to Google search only which should avoid these in app ads? Or are you looking for placements on the display network as well (or only)?
awhile back, google decided it would be better to ram mobile traffic down your throat. ie when you buy from them mobile is included by default. thats not to say that mobile won't do well for you. you'd be best served to separate this. on the google content network you'd be better served to create specific placements instead of using keywords. especially in your case. you can get good traffic from the content network it just takes a bit of learning/tweaking.
Everything in adwords seems designed to dump more money into google than you want to. Ads going to wrong places, "enhanced" campaigns that make it impossible to ignore mobile and tablet traffic, questionable quality score rating, etc. I've had my fill of it. Better to hire a firm to let them handle the mess.
Without any doubt in my mind, Google has switched from optimizing for user experience to optimizing for revenue. This should be appalling, amazing, and a major red flag for investors -- because it means Google is fighting hard to keep their revenue growth.
I come from the other side of the glass. My toddlers have iPads and constantly tap ads that are usually larger than real, in-app actions. Often the ads are interstitial between two game screens, or float next to the content they are interested in. Besides being frustrating for the kids, I have to be vigilant on the content of the ads they're seeing. From my experience, the ads are not always appropriate for kids. I really wish Apple would offer a "No Ads in Kids Apps" policy.
Why sit around wishing that Apple would change the policy? Why not just vet the apps that you're installing? If you are considering a free app, it's probably going to have either (a) ads or (b) persistent in app purchase nags. There are lots of good kids apps with neither (check the Toca Boca catalog for instance) but they might set you back as much as $1-3.
This is the approach I took. If the developer offered an adds free app I would gladly pay for it not to have to deal with "Daddy, the iPad is broken." only to find that Safari had launched and taken her away from her game.
Now that she is old enough to read and some of the game apps she has used her money to buy prompt her to upgrade I just tell her we don't do in app upgrades and she is very adept at dismissing the prompts. Fwiw - Toca Boca apps are great. I still see her playing them occasionally although in the past few months her interest in digital games has really fallen off and she wants to play some of the board games or hide-and-seek instead.
This could be a reasonable class action lawsuit: both against advertisers collecting personal information from children (whether they intended to or not) and from platforms serving inappropriate ads to children.
I think that Europe does not have class action suits. I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, USA has special laws around collecting and storing data of kids under 13 years old.
That is primary reason why facebook like companies tos excludes them. It is safe to assume that ad companies do not follow requirements written in these laws.
It's been a little while since I've used it, but doesn't Google let you do placement optimization based on meaningful conversions or other user-defined goals?
It sounds like the problem here was just Google's ad placement optimization looking for CTR alone as opposed to something that means more for Aha! (e.g., clicking past the landing page). In that case, the solution isn't so much in excluding certain platforms as much as optimizing for the right goals.
Unless your product/service really has no target audience among people who happen to use mobile or play games, excluding mobile/games with a blanket exclusion may be the wrong choice. Personally, I'd rather target whoever seems to be converting most in terms of things my business cares about rather than drawing arbitrary lines for which platforms see my ads.
Yes, that's true. When you set up the campaign/ad group, you can choose to optimize for clicks, or optimize for conversions, and at least one other optimization. I burned through a few grand choosing optimize for clicks myself...
The way to avoid wasting money like this is to ramp up your spending gradually using what's called 'discovery campaigns.' This is a risk management method that helps you to avoid the shittiest publishers (which is almost all of them). If you had done this you could have avoided this unhappy incident.
You can also bypass discovery campaigns by just running managed placements, which means whitelisting certain publishers only.
Google does a disservice to its customers by making it seem like 'anyone' who can paste an image into its tool can advertise effectively. Technically, yes, it's so easy that even a greedy pigeon with a corporate credit card can do it.
Practically, in many if not most verticals, it takes reading at least a couple textbooks worth of material to be effective, plus creative experience.
Google is not being shady in this instance. The only shady thing that it is doing is using its marketing to delude people with large enough budgets to hurt themselves into managing their own campaigns.
Another issue highlighted in this post that many professional advertisers complain about is that over the last few years, Google has tried to frogmarch desktop advertisers into tablet/mobile advertising, whereas it requires more finesse and planning to tailor campaigns to those devices than most clients are interested in using.
As a "professional advertiser" myself with a deep background in search this is spot on.
Also, people don't poke around enough in the help files or in the settings for their targeting to see that there are easy ways to avoid this from the start.
For example, Site Category Exclusions would be a good start, although the specific negatives they mention are good to note as well since I'm not sure the category exclusions will catch everything.
The architecture of the digital ad industry was created with computers in mind; it was only ported to touchscreens out of convenience. You just can't assume clicks imply intent on such inaccurate devices.
So don't optimize your campaigns simply for clicks.
A lot of people here are complaining that Google is doing something "shady" by making ads available to mobile platforms (mobile ads are here to stay regardless of how people feel about them - and that's not Google's fault) and optimizing by default for clicks (there's not much else that would be better as a default).
If it's not just clicks you want, then optimize for whatever you care about - conversions, sales, whatever. Mobile has simply made that distinction more clear than before.
The complaint originates from Google preventing advertisers from separating desktop & tablet bids. It is not that Google made ads available for mobile platforms but that they force you to purchase them. Kind of like if you want HBO.
Again, if you've set up your campaign to optimize for what you really want to see (not just clicks), then why would you even need to care about desktop vs tablets? There are more and more devices every day that blur the line between desktop and tablet, so it's really not that useful of a distinction to make.
What about desktops with touchscreens? People are probably just as likely to click your ad by mistake there as on a tablet. The problem isn't the platform or the method of user input. The problem is how your campaign is being optimized.
You can't optimize your ads for conversions until you've already had a minimum number of conversions (I think 30 per month?). Google can still run up hundreds of dollars of paid clicks that will never result in conversions before then (and mobile apps for kids are one way to do that).
As for desktop vs tablet, some people might be advertising a tablet-only app or a desktop-only app. In that case it's best to advertise on the device people can use it on, to streamline the download/purchase.
That's true. Still doesn't mean you should optimize for CTR when you're really interested in conversions. But I do see your point that in some cases - especially when starting a new campaign on a tight budget, it would be useful to manually target the campaign with more precision (including tablets vs desktop control and more obvious control for apps). Ideally, Google would allow people to start optimizing for conversions from the beginning, but I guess their algorithms have to start with something (clicks being the most abundant form of response data).
As for the desktop-only or tablet-only app, I'd still rather let that work itself out with conversion optimization (given that download conversions can be tracked effectively) rather than assuming my conversions are going to come through a certain channel. It comes down to the idea of making marketing decisions based on real data rather than what we're "sure" is best.
It just sounds like many people don't bother setting up conversion optimization out of ignorance - they think Google is somehow doing this app/game placement just to try and steal people's money, when really it's just a natural consequence of the CTR optimization. In the case of Aha!, it appears that most of the "wasted" money was spent before even realizing what was going on - and once they did figure it out, they apparently found the way exclude mobile apps without too much trouble (though I'd agree Google should make it easier).
Oh definitely, if you have the option to optimize for conversions, you should definitely try it. From memory that was a key factor in patio11 finding success with Bingo Card Creator.
That said, if your conversion rate is the typical "1% of trial users buy / x% of visitors download", it can take a long time to optimize. And if you try to use trial signups / downloads as a proxy conversion for sales, you can end up optimizing for the wrong thing (eg optimizing for freeloaders / kick the tyres, not buyers).
Curious to hear if Aha!'s mobile app exclusion method actually works - I tried a similar exclusion and it didn't work for me, I still play mobile app whack-a-mole. Google called me when I stopped my ads & told me that entering a -300% bid for mobile was a hack from engineering that would stop showing all ads on tablets, but the interface wouldn't accept anything more than -100% (which I already had).
You can hand over the task of bidding for conversions to Google. Besides presenting your business on a silver platter for them, you lose control over the finer points of your campaign.
Are there any SaaS apps that people recommend for managing online advertising?
The Google ads UI is overly complex for a typical small company, and that obfuscates what it really going on with your ads. In addition I would love to see a UI that automatically handled experimentation and A/B testing with display ads (by automatically generating the ad images based on set of possible captions and background images).
Google's platform has many auto management options. If you link your account with Google Analytics it gets really powerful. This is one of those areas you should either avoid completely or get a really good person putting 100% of their effort in to it. You can put it on auto pilot at some point, but that initial set up combined with landing page optimization on your side is critical and needs an exceptional effort. You are competing, in a psuedo-market, against the entire world for ad inventory.
Several years ago I spent a lot of money on one of the online ad management systems, but by the end of the 12 month contract there were more advanced features within Adwords than they had. There might be a good option out there now, but it is a moving target for that provider given constant change combined with pieces which aren't exposed by an API. (writing a custom scraper to automate data collection and tasks on a platform split testing their UI and features isn't very pretty either.)
Thanks for the suggestions. None of these are really what I had in mind - a tool that hides the complexities of campaign management and optimization. Where is the Zendesk of advertising?
I had a look at each of the websites. Wordstream is the only one that has any information on pricing. Adspert appears to be on target, but the pricing information just says "Adspert is affordable for every business". It looks like Adobe AdLens doesn't exist any more. A google search shows ads - but they just lead to a whitepaper signup.
Your adwords rep will hide the complexities if you like - be prepared to bleed money all over the place though - in many simple, complex and esoteric ways.
Most of those "no price listed" tools run somewhere between 5-15% of ad spend. Many times with high minimums. I see no reason to choose one from scratch.
Either learn adwords (really learn it, practice, test, do it right) or hire someone who knows what they're doing (and beware of all those who think they do but don't...)
Google is super optimized to get into your wallet so either play ball or stay the hell out of the path of the greatest money machine ever created as it rakes in cash all the way til it can't monopolize more.
You are unhappy with the results because you're optimizing towards clicks. You should always optimize towards whatever is important to you. So if you would like people to click through to a specific page, define that to be a conversion and then optimize towards conversions. Optimizing to clicks is not great even if you exclude mobile devices - it's just not what you want.
This, if you would like to do it yourself. However, the display advertising space is not currently as turnkey as search advertising, so in most cases you're better off handing off the trafficking of the campaign to an ad network. Quantcast and RocketFuel are two that focus specifically on delivering conversions, and both consistently beat Google on CPA (cost per action). Disclaimer: I currently work at Quantcast.
This problem extends to more than just kids playing around on mobile games.
Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.
Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.
Some of the mobile games definitely use questionable ways to present the ads. If anyone has ever played Subway Surfer (on Android), they can probably remember the countless amount of times one may accidentally click on the ads. On top of that, the ads load in such funny ways at times that it is hard to avoid clicking the ad.
As an advertiser and publisher myself, I feel bad for the people spending money on advertising in that game, because the 99% of the time that I have clicked on an ad in that game is because it was a mistake.
You did misunderstand. You can prevent Google ads from appearing in app without disabling you from showing up on tablets and phones in general. The option is not on by default though and seems to be a little hard to find.
Facebook is worse. If you use FB promoted/boosted posts you can not untarget mobile/tablets, which especially sucks if your ads are for desktop centric products.
Anyways- Is there a easy way on adwords to ONLY target desktop users? No tablets, no smartphones, no dumbphones.
I wonder if you can see as an advertiser which keyword caused your ad to be shown in a particular app? That would be pretty interesting as it would let you weed out ambiguous keywords (I don't know.. Memory the game vs memory as in RAM), and see real gaming of keywords (like a Flappy Bird clone with "Business", "Laywer" or "Mesothelioma" keywords).
Not being funny, but how many of us read the article, followed the link to Aha!, scrolled down to the bottom and went straight back to HN? Maybe the product just does not sell too well on an ad.
The Aha! moment didn't come until I called Google and the support person pointed out that the placement screen wouldn't show data for today. Until that point we spent a few days scratching our heads wondering what could account for the weird traffic patterns.
We have really detailed web analytics and the visitor patterns were just so unlike what we normally see. Especially the fact that the same visitor (almost always from an iPad) would come back multiple times with about 10 hours between visits. I am guessing that Google doesn't show the same ad to a user for some time after there has been a click which explains the 10 hours. But we were mystified why people who never left the landing page would click an ad again and again. Once we realized it was kids playing games it became obvious. Many times I have had to rescue my kids who accidentally clicked on an ad while playing an iPad game and gotten lost in some website.
Aha! is a tool for product managers to plan a roadmap, so keywords were related to "product management", "visual roadmap", etc. I am not sure how keywords match a game like Solitaire but my guess is that the game somehow contains a dictionary that they pass to google when ads are being chosen. Or perhaps the description of the game is keyword stuffed?
Except I have been seeing the same thing.
Google has all of the data. They know that publisher X's inventory performs at 1/100th (or less) of the competitions. They should be smart priced accordingly, at about a penny per click.
It was initially shocking. I have used a lot of ad platform in the past (nearly) decade and Google was the only one that consistently delivered high quality traffic that was obviously real people.
Here are a few other really dirty tricks Google will play on you:
#1 If you are selling ads from the publishing side, Google will sell you your own ads by running ads on your site unless you explicitly exclude your site from every ad campaign.
#2 Engagement ads. These are video ads that play on a mouse over. They report a mouse over as a "click."