
Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless - somid3
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-facebook-ad-traffic-90-useless-omid-sadeghpour
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bambax
Previously
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758)

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revicon
This line stuck out for me...

    
    
      Also when I turned off "Google Partners" and "external
      sites" from our campaigns, the ratio of idiot-clicks went
      down dramatically. I believe that most of the useless ?
      traffic (i.e.: bots or confused users) come from sites
      external to Google.
    

Most of the adwords best practices docs I've read, and going through the udemy
course Isaac Rudansky put out on adwords, it sounds like the extended google
partners network is best left turned off for all adword campaigns.

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somid3
True, that will open an infestation of bots.

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rhizome
What will, turning it off or enabling it? Your "that" is ambiguous.

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somid3
Enabling ads to third-party websites other than Google properties.

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angry-hacker
Or a lot of content farms and other bs that is using adsense.

There are decent sites too of course, but you cab target then manually I
believe. Arstech for an example.

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Animats
Google's third-party ads are known to be almost useless. Referrals directly
from a Google search have some value. But this article goes beyond that. It
indicates that most clicks on third party ads are coming from bots.

It would be useful for a few sites to publish IP addresses and times from
which they get bot-like traffic. Maybe a pattern will emerge.

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ssharp
A simple way to try and block out bots is to just not allow your ads to show
to Linux users. It's a tiny fraction of most website's traffic but the largest
share of bot traffic. I'd further speculate that real desktop Linux users are
substantially more likely to have an ad block running anyway.

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ams6110
And why would a bot disclose that it's a "linux user" and not just send some
sort of Windows agent string?

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fictioncircle
A non-negligible portion of the bot networks are teenagers and college
students learning how to manipulate the system.

Inexperienced operators like that make amateur mistakes like leaving in
default user-agent strings for a variety of tools that are frequently linux-
based as its cheap to go on something like LowEndTalk.com, pick up a couple
$2/month VMs, pick up some proxies, and test out a small group of bots
designed to fake traffic to generate Ad revenue.

The reason I said teenagers & students is you have to be really, really
sophisticated for that sort of operation to scale beyond $100/month in profit
so its generally something I've seen people "learn" on, realize the
limitations, and move on. (i.e. Making no amateur mistakes that flag your
traffic as non-legit and being able to use an IP address only a couple of
times a day in random patterns)

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downandout
I have had similar experiences, but even if the traffic is 90℅ useless, that
means 10℅ isn't. It's an auction, so bid an amount where clicks from each
particular network are profitable to you. There are some niches where brand
advertisers and well-funded startups willing to lose money will suck up all
the inventory unprofitably. You simply won't be able to compete with that type
of activity unless you also have money that you are willing to light on fire.

However, there are pockets of profitability within the PPC arena. They shift
quite a bit at various times based on the competitive landscape...an
unprofitable niche today may be a profitable one two months from now after
someone that was driving up bids burns through all their cash. You just have
to monitor and deploy when the CPC is low enough for you in your niche.

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salesguy222
℅ instead of %? this is off topic but curious if you use it deliberately and
what you want the reader to feel about it :)

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downandout
I was just typing on an Android phone I use for development purposes and that
was the only key I saw for %. I didn't mean anything by it :)

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salesguy222
And now we know ^.^ maybe I will start sprinkling deceptively similar symbols
in my writing• :)

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cm2012
Either your ads are effective at driving more sales than the ads cost or they
aren't. It doesn't matter what % of the traffic is "fake" as long as the
bottom line works.

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edblarney
It's useful to some things, esp. when there is a high value potential click
conversion, i.e. amazon and ebay items.

Some ads are bought by brand advertiser with little understanding of the
impact because a) it's 'brand' and hard to measure in the first place, and b)
they have a huge budget, need to spread it across channels, so they just 'buy
X$' of 'social ads' on the 'trusted networks' because that's the marketing mix
required of their bosses or client. To be fair - print and TV ads have the
same problem. Marketing is not a hard science in many places, and they have
big budgets :).

But it clearly works for some folks.

There should be no surprise at in-links from reddit: theres usually a degree
of clear interest in the first place, and second, there is a 'voting'
structure that naturally moves better quality stuff to the top of the pile.

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xiphias
If the advertiser used the same bids on different properties, the campaign
wasn't yet set up well. Also the device (mobile/desktop/tablet), query,
language and many other features of the user session change the conversion
rate, which means the bid should be different. The fact that the ads were
useless meant that either there is too much auction pressure and the
advertiser wasn't able to compete, or he just didn't set up the campaign well
(which is of course a hard task).

It would be good to know if the advertiser was using Enhanced CPC or not,
which can increase the effectiveness of the ads, but even then it takes money
to set up the bids correctly.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a relevant product

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rhizome
What is "auction pressure?"

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xiphias
It means how competitive the bids are for the auction.

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synicalx
When you think about it, "real" advertising is the same - think how many
people drive past a billboard vs how many of them actually buy whatever is on
the billboard.

Google/Facebook really shoot themselves in the foot by claiming that they only
target your ads at people who are already interested in what you're selling.
That makes their ad services sound like some sort of marketing panacea and
sets the expectation that you'll get a lot more interest than you actually
will. What they don't want to acknowledge is that people are just as
desensitised to, and disinterested in online ads as they are in "real" ads.

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IgorPartola
I wish ads I put out there had a 10% conversion rate. Sorry, this just seems
like such a click bait title, I could t resist.

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benologist
Gleaning value from their advertising will become the dialup of this
generation as entrenched manipulation and adblocking grow concurrently and
they can't thwart either group.

AOL still milks dialup, but the debate has long-shifted to how they could
possibly be getting away with it. That's Google/FB style advertising in
another decade when 1 in 1000s of clicks is an actual person you want to pay
to reach but they continue to use contrived metrics to justify billing for
100s.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-
advertising...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-advertising-
metrics.html)

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guyb7
Had the same experience with Google and Facebook ads. ~80% of the clicks are
simple bots that don't run javascript or store cookies.

Additional ~10% are more sophisticated bots that try to mimic real people
behavior, but when you compile their actions to a video it's really easy to
see that they are not human.

Most of these bots are run by agencies with the purpose of clicking on their
clients' ads.

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uladzislau
It really depends on the product and the industry as well as many other
factors like proper targeting, ad copy, matching expectations of the user,
etc.

I've seen many ad campaigns with fantastical results or at least very positive
ROI and many spectacular failures too.

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pacomerh
I tried it once for a month and I got results, probably more than 10% (To sell
a music album). I was super specific with the demographic, I guess that helps.

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Wildgoose
Ah, but which 90%?

And 10% useful doesn't sound too bad....

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taylorbuley
10%, yeah not so bad. an issue with CPC is that you still pay for the other
90%.

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ckdarby
This was already on here.

