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I am a Google certified premier partner managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in spend a month for Google AdWords... Google ads have become a giant scam over the last few years. Be extremely careful, they are constantly changing things in ways that border on outright fraud. Google used to be a company I respected and loved, I am disappointed to see what's happened recently. It would be great to see someone with integrity step up and set the company back on the right path.

Oh yes, those baby clicks on YouTube. Annyoing as hell. Stay away from broad affinity / in-market groups or you'll end up spending 20%-40% of your budget on channels for toddlers.

By time though you'll build up a nice list that you can exclude, but it's going to cost you in the start.

This killed my budget on a display campaign I setup last year and there seems to be no easy way to mass exclude these channels. I even tried setting the content of my ads as not family friendly but still found this didn’t solve the problem for retargeting campaigns.

That is exactly why i dont use display. Eventually you can set reach with frequency set to 1 and lowest cost per view possible. And each our ban all junk. There is a lots of it, so it is impossible to remove all. But after two, three days, you get a nice list of websites where actually you want to display ads. Than you can show ads only on these pages.

Other way is to use keyword setting. Not as topic or observation, but page containing a keyword. With good set of keywords it is possible to rule out baby clicks

> Oh yes, those baby clicks on YouTube.

A friend's toddler was watching a cartoon with songs on YouTube, and they were deeply focused on it when an ad popped in their face. They didn't stop crying for an hour.

By excluding channels for kids from your ad campaign you can both save money and avoid scaring children, so go for it. :)

> if you set a budget of 100 dollars per day, Google can, and most likely, will, spend 200 dollars in short campaign per day.

How is this possible? It sounds like a bug, but it's probably not, so what's their justification?

Launching an ad campaign feels like rocket science now mixed with a good amount of woodoo magic. 80% down the drain by default? That's a number I could believe, but freaks me out how to market my side project to get actual people on my service. And I'm on a ridiculous budget, I can't afford the "throw money on the wall and see what sticks" method with 500$.

As I understand it the reasoning given tends to be that ad auctions happen extremely quickly, and therefore too quickly to check some single source of truth for your current budget.

Therefore, the budget is only "eventually consistent" - i.e. at the end of the campaign or after a day or so, the number you're being charged is accurate. However during the campaign itself it's not possible to guarantee that things won't go slightly over budget as each individual ad auction cannot feasibly check the central budget.

That said, it definitely feels like there should be a way to implement this such that it backs off as the budget is approached, so that overshoots are likely to be minor, rather than 100% of the budget as apparently happens on a regular basis.

I'm pretty sure fixing bugs that make money is on the very bottom of the list of priorities....

Back when I was in the ads org, there was no month without a big important future launch, that was supposed to make us make less money in the short term.

They don't need a bug fix as a stopgap. The fair thing to do would be refund the excess. If I set a limit and they display ads and exceed it, why should it be my problem?

Excess is calculated at end of month not daily

I suspect a factor that makes this trickier is cost per click. You're bidding for a click not a particular spend, so if your cost per click is ~$0.01 then overrunning by 100 clicks only costs $1 over budget. If you're more like $1-5 a click (not uncommon) then you can easily get to $100 over budget.

My guess is that this is worse the lower your budget, and $100 a day is a low budget for Google ads when you're considering the whole industry.

I would expect that with a budget of, say, $5000 a day, you might still be ~$100 out.

No. They overshoot because there’s a small-letter asterisk within the budged definition that allows then to overshoot at twice the amount.

I wouldn't use the word likely. It might be because of who your target group is etc and I therefore have another experience. But yes, it does happen. The way it works is that Google allow themself to spend up to 2x your daily budget. If they exceed your daily x2, you'll be credited any overcharged amount.

Eg. Your daily budget is $200 and they spend $420, you’ll get a $20 credit.

Then there is the monthly limit, which is your daily budget x 30.4. Also here you'll be credited any amount they exceed.

what's the point of that? knowing that, why wouldn't i just set the budget to $50 and avoid the problem that way?

Most likely the algorithms that chooses whose ad gets shown are optimized to not have to look up each persons spend for that day, as syncing that between all servers on every page request would be more expensive than all other steps combined.

I'm not sure how they could let you overrun by several times your budget for a day however, syncing these every hour shouldn't be a problem.

I have explained it in other comment above. Its not technical issue. Its by design

So basically it sounds like the "budget" is actually more of a "target spend", that they will try to approximately hit in the short run, and hit very accurately on average over a month.

Google explains that on the long run, like,30 daya of campaign, it will be proper on average. The explanationis, that Google will spend more when it sees possibilities to give more value in specific time. For example, there is a special day when people buy more than usual, but later they dont. So there is more budget spend on this special day, and less on others to make it even.

So there is a reason behind it. But its something well hidden. You have 500 dollars for a one week campaign, and it occurs you pay 1000 dollars for it. It does not seem to be right.

There is no reason to that aside from Google making more money. They are not your friend.

Actually yes. Google wants to have advertisers who spend fixed amount each month without going much into details. They dont care much about anything more

For example keyword targetting gets broader.and broader. If you target.for keyword you want to target it precisely or with synonyms but you want to have control over it. But Google changed it lately to make it harder to narrow down keywords.

The result is you spend budget on bad keywords. And it seems like ok,if i get money from it overall.

But actually not only you loose budget but others too, because they need to bid higher.

They need.to bid higher for keywords you dont care about but they care. For Google its additional money.

It's not a bug per se and is designed this way. The ad budgets are calculated on 30 days basis. So if you set the budget to $100 per day, Google will display ads with monthly budget of 100*30 or $3000. The objective is to suck out as much money as possible from the advertiser very quickly.

The only assurance is that your monthly budget won't exceed $3000

I've been seeing 80% of clicks as fraud/nonsense/fake/whatever for a decade.

> And Google removed an option to disable mobile apps altogether lately.

can you adjust bid to -100% for mobile?

It excludes websites. And nowadays you dont want to block ads on websites viewed on mobile devices. You want to block Android ad fraud apps. Google blocked the possibility to do it. Essencially making fraud apps creators extremely easy and luxurious.

And as you can expect, Google has 10 times stricter requirements for websites showing their ads, than for Android apps...

Minimum modifier is -90%, so you only can penalize mobile.

I can personally confirm another f'd up Google Display Ad scheme... When looking at the list of mostly gambling sites that their almighty algo decided we would have most success in for a niche UX platform!

So why even use a platform that so easily throws your money away for nothing? With those points you laid out I would be better off keeping my money.

Facebook is the same way with all of this crap too. I’ve seen more success with the hard way, networking and getting content made about me and distributed in magazines or online blogs from people who get to use my service for free.

And it is best you can do. Essencially Ads should be the last resort and used with extreme care to not waste a dime. And this takes a lots of focus unfortunately.

Keep the budget low, so you wont bother about it, and use money for anything else than Google Ads.

And its not like i am against Google or something. Actually i have a company that runs Google Ads for clients. So i dont have any hidden interest to criticize Google Ads, contrary. But its the truth and its just something i think everyone should be aware of.

I think it best to think about the ads in the same way you would in any other medium. Unless you have a special offer or something, it's just branding. The original hypothesis upon which Google was founded, that people would be interested in buying things if they were searching the internet for something relatable, seems to have failed- at least in the near-term sense. Just because I am looking for campsites in the Rockies doesn't mean I am in the market for a sleeping bag. But to put the ad in front of me then to make me aware of your brand might be useful. That's the game played by advertisers since they began with media advertising.

Given this, all of the data collection/tracking/etc. seems like a round-off error in effectiveness, and doesn't seem to be worth the loss of individual privacy.

Yes, for near terms its branding. In theory it should make you consider the company when you move to buying stuff stage. But the theory also tells you would need to be exposed to the company with multiple channels. Search counts as one. So it does not work solo.

Because the money it doesn't throw away for nothing more than covers the expense.

Sales aren't some abstract thing that can't be quantified.

Site gets no traffic -> Spend $X on google or facebook pointing traffic to site -> Y Amount of traffic -> $Z amount of sales.

You now know how much revenue $X worth of ads buys you. You also know how much each amount of revenue is worth to you in profit. As long as spending that $X makes profit, you're gonna do it. No matter what crap is mixed in by the ad company.

If something you want is bundled with something you don't want and is priced such that you're willing to buy the thing you want at that price, you don't turn it down. You buy it and ignore the thing you don't want.

Given their monopoly power, this is beginning to sound increasingly like a tax on businesses.