I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times | Hacker News Reader

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

lydiaoncybersecurity.com

61 pointslstepanek70 comments

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-cale...

You’re probably better off shipping free hardware to appropriate bloggers, etc rather than burning cash at the altar of Google.

yes. That's what I will probably try.

I'm partial to https://www.sevarg.net myself; it's not me but he may be interested.

> In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned

My stab-in-the-dark would be using the word "Google," probably by overly-simple heuristics trying to prevent tech support scams. You know, those flashing banner ads that say "Immediate action required on your Google account! Click here to fix!"

Could be related to your site saying "Note: Due to high demand, current orders may take two weeks to ship. ".

Thats pretty long. What do you have set in your merchant center shipping settings? See https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069284?hl=en

That note is just there since last week because there was a peak in orders and I am struggling to keep up. It wasn't there when they paused my merchant account.

1) Mentioning Google and Google account many times

2) something innocent (using Tor, using blocklisted VPN, being associated with a banned google account)

3) something you're not telling us (violating some google policy, billing address in sanctioned country, using stolen cc, I know you didn't but you asked to guess!)

My guess is that it is probably 1). Somebody in their anti-spam team read "Google Calendar", saw my display and thought "Nah, that's no google calendar" :D

But maybe it was something else. It's of course possible I violated some kind of policy. But they're not sending me any debug messages :D

This looks like a very nice product and it matches exactly something that I've been wanting and thinking about. So I tried to order one (using PayPal), but it doesn't seem like you're shipping to Norway. Are you planning to open up for shipments to more countries any time soon?

Norway requires CE, as far as I know. I don't have that certification yet, it's quite expensive, about 7000 Euro.

It pains me that I cannot sell within Europe, I can see the sales I am losing.

Hopefully I can bootstrap those funds before the holiday season :D

EDIT: I created a google form. When it is available in Europe, I will notify anyone who leaves their email: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

I don't think you would need to pay so much. In most cases i.e. not health, not children etc you can even self certify: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/l...

I want one so bad. Only thing is, I'd like to run my own software on it - do you support modding?

yes and no.

It's easy if you just want to display your own content:

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

or, if you want to share your app with others, there is:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

It's hard if you want to run your own embedded code. I just haven't written the documentation for it and you would need your own UART flasher board.

> I just haven't written the documentation for it and you would need your own UART flasher board.

That would not be an issue. However, I'm based in Germany as well... do you have some sort of newsletter?

No newsletter, but I just created a google form I you want to get notified if/when it is available in Europe: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

Wow, very clever, just display an image! Does the image server really have to be on the Internet? Can I just enter a locally-resolvable hostname or IP address?

Has to be online since it is proxied via an online backend which does the actual black-and-white conversion etc.

I have some ideas for letting users point the device directly to a local URL, but I don't want to commit to any promises on that front.

You could try using something like https://ngrok.com, that's what I sometimes use for testing.

Hm, I see. I’m pretty sure I can figure out how to serve a greyscale image. I suggest making that proxy explicit in your docs. You suggest using HTTPS and an obscure URL to keep our data “secret” but then you’re literally processing our content and could be doing anything with it.

That's a valid point. Image data is never stored, only hashes. But it passes though the server and I don't like that either.

It's not quite greyscale, it has to be in a specific binary black-and-white representation, but definitely do-able if documented. Or I could publish a little python library.

Just thinking out loud here.

Yeah don’t mean to diminish the project, it’s very cool! I’m sure you already have a lot of work into it.

This thing is almost exactly what I was looking for less than a week ago. It’s actually even simpler and more clever than I imagined. For me less is more. Just serve an image at a URL. EZPZ.

If you want to make it hackable I suggest docs first because everyone is going to want to use their own preferred language. Maintaining a library is just more work and image processing libraries are already a dime a dozen.

That's a good point about documentation-first. Sometimes a little reference code can say more than 1000 words, though :)

Awesome work, and awesome product. I want to plug a friend's project, 15 years ago, Google's Radish - https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/radish - Which looks pretty primitive and bulky by comparison but had excellent engineering and set of tradeoffs at the time.

What's it's power draw? Can it be run from a battery for a few weeks? That's one of the big advantages of e-paper over a tablet screen (the other major one being viewing angles), and one with a built in battery (so it can report status on the screen itself) would be great.

It doesn't have an internal battery and I don't know the exact power draw.

But since it's in deep sleep most of the time, I don't think it draws a lot.

Why mention Google calendar? Why not also display Outlook calendars or whatever?

Seems like you could, and Google is probably wondering why you are trying to use their name in your product?

Lots of red flags for this commodity product, which is issue three.

Commodity product? Are there other e-ink calendars/generic displays? I was looking for one the other day and came up with nothing.

That’s a really nice-looking product, and inspiring to those of us who’d like to create and sell our own creations.

Thanks man.

Oh wow I was just looking for something like this the other day. The actual calendaring feature isn't as useful to me as a live weather report and daily forecast (next 24 hour weather) plus tide chart. Can this be customized/hacked?

You can point it to an image URL and it will refresh whenever that image changes.

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

So as long as you can dynamically serve an image of the content you want to see, you can connect the display to it.

Or you can even build an app that others can use (this is experimental still):

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

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.

In terms of openness, there is this:

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

and this:

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

Are you aware of the CE Self Certification process?

https://cemarking.net/ce-marking-knowledgebase/ce-self-certi...

This still requires you do do EMC testing, including Wifi and Bluetooth band testing.

Like, you need to rent out a lab for a day or so. And probably want to pay an expert to write the docs for you.

Even though it contains a fully certified esp32-WROOM WIFI module, CE requires me to bring my own lab reports.

In that case I would suggest you sell it as a kit.

I think that's a but of a legal gray area... not quite sure.

PS:

Good to see you on HN still after all those years, cool to see you interested in my little project. :)

Just in case you have something on the top of your mind... I am kind of looking to build a bit of a hardware - boostrapper support network for myself, do you know anyone I should reach out to? Just other people working in the space... I am not too sure about hardware incubators but I would also be open to ideas there..

Yes, there is HN user https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Kliment who is super knowledgeable about this stuff, and in Germany.

I get parts shipped to me all the time from the US to EU via Mouser, I can't imagine it being a problem.

It doesn't seem as though GP has a problem sourcing parts, it's more of a networking issue (networking in the real-world sense).

I wasn't talking about sourcing parts, OP was talking about certification for sales in the EU which I think can be sidestepped selling as a kit of disparate electronic parts. I can receive Mouser shipments from the US to Germany, for example, as long as they're not development boards (which require a declaration of usage) or certain batteries.

I can't imagine why OP would be unable to ship those parts as a kit if they so chose.

I don't see that either. There is nothing legally grey about shipping kits. There is about shipping a finished product and marking it as a kit.

Thanks! Anywhere I can get updates for Europe certification? Rare case I'd subscribe to a newsletter if you mentioned it in there.

No, I don't have one... I really need to get one going. In the meantime, there is only instagram: http://instagram.com/invisiblecomputers/

EDIT:

I decided to crate a google form if you want to get notified:

https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

Thanks!

I clicked through to see what got you banned and I gotta be honest, this product looks pretty good! Just wanted to note that.

> 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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

The internet isn't just competitive, it's a combat zone.

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.

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.

>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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> “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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

> 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).

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.

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