Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
blog.aha.io
blog.aha.io
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."
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.
(Unless you run Xprivacy or Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard, etc.)
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.
Your analysis is off.
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.
I have found it brings nearly 0 conversions for regular websites.
To do this paste "adsenseformobileapps.com" in the “Placements” section of “Campaign Exclusions” from the Display Network tab.
More info on how to disable in app adwords advertising is here https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722057?hl=en
It is experimental, and called "GMob mobile app non-interstitial", and it is under "Site Category Exclusions".
GMob - I think this is Google internal term for the AdMob business they bought
non-interstital - I think this is a fancy word for "banner" ads.
If you put it all together, excluding "GMob mobile app non-interstitial" as a Site Category, should stop your ads from running in mobile app banners.
If you do this when creating a campaign, then you can still target tablets without getting killed by flappy bird on the iPad.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yup. As a quasi-professional advertiser with a medium-depth background in search, I'm glad to hear that I'm on the correct track.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.)
You have to setup conversion, and insert corresponding javascript into your conversion page.
Than make your AdWords campaigns to focus on conversions instead of clicks.
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.
[1]http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-n...
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.
Anyways- Is there a easy way on adwords to ONLY target desktop users? No tablets, no smartphones, no dumbphones.
PPC #201
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.