
Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US - siggi
https://medium.com/@siggi/google-adwords-charged-me-for-clicks-in-istanbul-while-location-targeting-the-u-s-e705b3bdc8a5
======
tomaszs
Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately.
There are more things to watch out.

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

Another thing: in display campaign, on default, most of the budget will be
drained by mobile fraud applications that generate fake clicks. And also by
video clicks made by babies on YouTube. And Google removed an option to
disable mobile apps altogether lately.

Keyword targeting - on default Google uses broad matching including variants
etc. Eventually you can pay for clicks for non relevant keywords that will
also drain most of the budget.

Another thing: Google advises to put ads on your company name. It is a neat
strategy, because you pay for something you had for free. And campaign seems
to have better statistics.

Another thing. You wont believe it, untill you see it. Aprox up to 80% of ad
traffic are bots. And advertising platforms does not recognize it or refund.

And so on... I am working on Google Ads campaigns for several years now.
Always say to my client two things:

1) Google and Facebook will spent every penny you want to spend

2) Spend on ads only such amount on money, you can live without, and keep it
running for a longer time without interruption.

3) Optimise often

~~~
tiborsaas
> 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$.

~~~
kchamplewski
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.

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

~~~
hnick
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?

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
Excess is calculated at end of month not daily

------
tehwebguy
Google bundles bad clicks like a pile of stinking, rotten subprime mortgages
and then peppers them with some good clicks and sells them to you like JP
Morgan in 2005.

Did you read the fine print? Doesn’t matter, you can’t redline it anyway so
it’s take it or leave it.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
Replace 'Google' with any other large digital advertising platform and your
comment would still make sense.

I've seen funded dating startup from US, which released their ad campaign on
Facebook targeting 'Worldwide' for maximum clicks (thinking the clicks would
be distributed), 90% of their users were from Philippines and they had to
eventually change their product to Philippines only (no offence to
Philippines, it's just not what the startup intended to do).

~~~
treebornfrog
Then the marketing person lacks fundamental understanding of the platform.

Also, how do you spend so much cash and ignore the stats for so long that you
have to change the target demographic for the app?

------
oceliker
I'm somewhat confused here. I live in the US but regularly visit Turkey to see
family (say, once a year). I also regularly Google things related to the US
when I'm there.

Clicks outside the US are not necessarily meaningless -- the screenshot in the
article shows that they are targeting people "regularly in the US". Just
because I left for a couple of weeks does not mean I abandoned everything
related to where I live. There's still value in targeting US ads to me,
independent of my current location.

~~~
jasonlfunk
I’m the opposite. An American living abroad. US targeted ads still are
applicable to me. I can understand why someone might want to disable this
feature, but it’s not a scam by any means.

~~~
jfoster
> US targeted ads still are applicable to me.

Not necessarily applicable to the advertiser, though. If there's a US
restaurant chain hoping for regular customers, they would be wasting their ad
spend if you're on the receiving end of the ads.

------
tyingq
Sounds like excluding all other countries is the only solution.

Google does provide a CSV with all the AdWords recognized countries:
[https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/geot...](https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/geotargeting)

You should be able to copy the list to the clipboard and paste into the
exclusion list.

~~~
janesvilleseo
This is the answer.

I can’t tell you the times I have had to tell clients and other search
marketing professionals that they need to have a negative list.

Budgets are not infinite and they need to be managed to get the most out of
them.

~~~
dwd
I've mentioned this previously as a dark pattern that trips most people up.

It's probably fair to assume setting a target location is it, not that you
additionally have to exclude the rest of the world. And it's buried in the
advanced settings, so anyone looking for a quick default setup just do the
minimum required setting presented to them.

------
asadkn
Never rely on Google Ads to be honest. They are unlikely to respond at all.

After spending ~100k, our ads randomly stopped working last month without
changing anything. Support took 10 days to reply saying the account was up for
a review (no notifications sent, no indicators). Yet, it still wasn't working.

Booked a consultation with one of their so-called "Experts", he couldn't find
anything wrong and suggested to contact support again.

After the initial 10 days response, still waiting for a reply from so-called
support 20 days later. I'd assume support only exists for companies that spend
millions a year.

~~~
edmundsauto
Is it possible that your experience is an outlier, and not generalizable as
advice?

~~~
asadkn
I have read similar stories all over the community in general. The support
simply doesn't exist or takes 2 weeks for a simple, useless response,
generally.

Given your vested interest in Ads and Google in specific, I am sure you know
this already.

~~~
edmundsauto
What percentage of serious inquiries are responded to outside the SLA? What
percentage of those fail to resolve the user's problem?

Without that kind of information, reading stories after having a bad
experience will turn your brain into a petri dish for confirmation bias.

~~~
asadkn
Ignoring the red herring, and the assumption I read these stories after a bad
experience, let me address, yet, as a consumer, all that matters is the vocal
user experience.

If there are 100 bad stories out there, that's enough of a failure of a
company irrelevant of its size. And I have personally conducted the support
experiment multiple time over the years to have the first-hand experience.

Either way, since you clearly have a vested interest in Ad companies from your
HN comment history, I shall engage no more.

------
emn13
I mean, this all sounds sort of like a reasonable complaint... until you get
to the sample size: 3 clicks.

It appears arguably reasonable that geotargeting isn't exact, nor is it clear
that these clicks weren't actually real and valuable. If he's trying to make
the point that the trend is disturbing, well, then: make that point with
something akin to a real sample (at least 1000 clicks, spread over more than a
week?)

------
quickthrower2
Well... some people based in the US travel outside of the US sometimes.

------
ilamont
That's the Google AdWords way ... _by default_ , include people "interested
in" the United States with no end date. So, lots of junk clicks at high CPCs
from India, former Soviet Republics, and other places where the local language
may not even be English. Turning these settings off requires drilling down
into some obscure Google Ads interface ... it used to be _AdWords Dimensions >
Geographic_, but not sure what it is now.

If you call them on it, the Google phone reps will say with a straight face,
“Let's say people with family in Moldova want to look for something to tell
their relatives in the U.S.”

The ethical way for Google to handle this would be to make all U.S. campaigns
_by default_ target users in the U.S., Indian campaigns target users in India,
Moldovan campaigns target users in Moldova, etc. If businesses want to expand
their campaigns to people living in other countries for whatever reason, give
them the option but don't make it the default.

I feel especially sorry for the local small business owners trying to counter
the SEO garbage and Yelp reviews that clutter the results. They try to set up
the campaigns trusting Google's guidance, and they're lucky if 10% of clicks
end up being target customers living in the same area. Often they have no clue
about what's going on, and wonder why their campaigns are costing so much for
only a trickle of real customers.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I had to do this for my midwestern US shed manufacturing business. Since we
deliver up to 350 miles away, I set the geographic target to a radius around
my business location.

Seemed to eliminate most of the junk clicks.

------
cpsempek
This type of behavior allows for a known ad arbitrage strategy. Bing’s PPC
network, for instance, use to not have the same geo coverage as AdWords, and
when they received traffic from a geo they weren’t serving ads in they would
send the search to their US ad network. The strategy then is

1\. Buy AdWords ads in countries out of Bing’s coverage,

2\. Send these clicks to a page serving your Bing feed’s ads for same/similar
keyword search,

3\. Realize Bing US CPCs on international AdWords ad buys

~~~
csomar
But how much is your conversion rate for the transferred users. It is not like
it is 100%. If it is 5%, you'll need x20 times the CPC to break-even.

~~~
huac
no, because the Google ads would be served in low CPM countries (eg Turkey)
whilst the Bing ads would be served as if the user was from the US (high CPM).

------
JCharante
I mean it says right there that they may also be people regularly in the US. I
don't see why I'm less of a marketable audience for a SaaS when I'm abroad.

~~~
bitcoinbutter
The problem is, it also includes anyone who has ever logged into a US VPN.
There is no doubt that this will catch some Americans who are abroad, but if
you are getting 3-4 non-US clicks to get 1 American abroad click, you are
effectively paying 4-5x for that one useful click.

~~~
quickthrower2
So is everyone else, so in theory the auctioned price per click should be less
to compensate.

People don’t pay for clicks, they pay for results. Clicks are an intermediate
measure. If I make $100 from $50 spend via 1000 or 100 clicks it’s pretty much
the same thing.

------
GordonS
A bit OT, but does anyone have any advice on improving page relevancy quality
scores?

My site is focused only on relevant content in a particular infosec niche, and
is well written - yet quality scores across the site are 2-4, and have been
for the entire site history, which spans almost 20 years. Which means we pay
more for ads.

I've been through the usual guides, and I can't find anything actionable -
they all basically boil down to "have relevant content" \- but I _do_ ,
dammit!

I've also taken up Google's frequent offers of free help from an expert on 2
occasions. Both times all they did was try to get me to increase my spend
(e.g. enabling the search network etc), and parroted about "writing relevant
content", even though both agreed that the content seemed very relevant to
them.

The site has been rewritten from scratch a couple of times over the years - no
change.

I even paid a copywriter a couple of years back, but the tweaked content still
resulted in the same 2-4 quality scores.

I'm considering switching to a different domain, closing the AdWords account
and opening a new one, but I've no idea if that would actually change
anything.

~~~
edmundsauto
I would try several different approaches in your content. Don't get hung up on
what _you_ think is relevant -- what matters is what _google_ thinks is
relevant. Since they don't tell you precisely, try a few different variations
-- going for maximum diversity, since you're in a search optimization grid
like the board game Battleship.

You need to try things that are as different as possible. Don't rewrite it --
explicitly take different approaches with the goal of making them very
different from each other. Then run an experiment.

------
appleiigs
If I am in Turkey and I google “chicken USA”, I should get shown chicken ads
from the USA. And when I click, those chicken producers should pay.

~~~
rtpg
If you hired an ad agency to run radio commercials in Texas and then get a
bill saying "oh by the way we found cheap ad space in Tokyo so ran some there
too, here's the bill", you'd probably question your relationship with them.

I understand it's not the same thing, but it sure smells the same

~~~
appleiigs
The blog author didn't read the docs. He signed up for a relationship and just
assumed it would be different and now he's complaining about it. As I
mentioned in another comment: From Google AdWords help docs it says "By
default, location targeting includes both physical locations and _locations of
interest_ ".

------
james_impliu
I recently created ad campaigns on Twitter/Facebook and Google for our
startup. The dark patterns like this were shocking. They really taste of short
term metric driven growth that doesn't consider "now I'm paying for clicks
that will never convert, I'm going to churn as an account totally".

For example, Adwords defaults into advertising on every device which now
includes TVs. This channel would never work for our business (an app that
integrates with GitHub), and I'm sure this would work badly for many other
businesses. We only found it by digging into the campaign stats once it had
launched.

It also strikes me how long the approval takes for new ads - 48 hours. How
many advertisers drop off in that time? That feels like a real value add thing
to focus on.

------
Simon_says
I'm really skeptical of the narrative that Alphabet et. al. have brilliant,
super-precise targeting of ads. I'm an American who only speaks English, but
I'm currently living in a non-English-speaking country. Youtube _constantly_
serves me videos in a language I don't understand. Mostly, I don't even
understand what product is trying to be sold to me, and for the minority where
the product is clear, I don't understand the arguments, and I'll never buy
these things, anyways.

I've never watched a non-English video or ever interacted with the non-English
speaking web. How on Earth can Alphabet screw up so much? The only thing I can
fathom is that Alphabet is optimizing for getting more advertising revenue,
long-term effectiveness of their ads be damned.

~~~
csa
Maybe optimizing their ad impressions for folks like you doesn’t justify the
engineering costs to implement it.

I’m not sure where you are, but I imagine that folks like you are a very tiny
percentage of the market.

------
ben_jones
I wonder how google handles vpn users, particularly in countries where vpns
are fairly ubiquitous like China or even Iran. If someone in Turkey is clearly
identified as a Turkish user despite having a vpn in the United States, I
shouldn’t be charged for them right?

~~~
muratsu
You might be technically right but Google is incentivized to charge you. Also,
it's probably really hard (technically) to resolve your real identity.

~~~
SXX
It is super simple for Google to resolve real identify of most of users and
fraudsters. At least there absolutely no justification for Google not to
detect fraud in cases where OP could do it using his own statistics.

Your browser by default leak your OS version (Chinese using older versions
very often), locale (of course there is tons of users with Thai or Turkish
locale outside of their home country, right?), fonts, etc, etc. Basically
everything is can be used and actually actively used for fingerprinting. In
cases of some proxies WebRTC can just leak your real IP. I wont even start on
the fact that Google controls web browser that is used by 50% internet users
and it's sent a lot of data to the mothership.

And yeah if you try to mess with Google itself by let's say mass registering
accounts you'll understand how good they are at protecting their own
infrastructure and money. At the same time why should they care about someone
else lost money? So they don try to fix it.

------
JeremyMorgan
So glad I'm not involved in PPC anymore. We used to catch junk clicks all the
time, from many different countries. One company I worked with was local and
wanted very targeted local clicks. Nothing I could do could stop clicks from
other states and countries, which were useless to them.

Don't get me started about Twitter advertsing. Want some followers for your
business? Twitter will gladly send you tons of obviously fake profiles as soon
as you get too many impressions without a click. Like profiles without real
pictures and timelines consisting only of retweets.

You have to tolerate an accepted amount of cruft with any PPC campaign.

~~~
trilliumbaker
The cruft is getting worse as Google takes away control from managers and
turns it over to AI. It's like how exact match no longer means exact match.

~~~
treebornfrog
This.

And in addition they no longer show average position metric (1) which
increases barrier to entry, they now only show impression share.

(1) [https://www.practicalecommerce.com/say-goodbye-to-average-
po...](https://www.practicalecommerce.com/say-goodbye-to-average-position-
metric-in-google-ads)

------
wolco
The wording makes targetting useless.

But other questions came up.

Why do so many quit google after less than five years?

How does a company who's product is a push notification when someone clicks
get funding?

~~~
kevinventullo
> Why do so many quit google after less than five years?

Usually initial stock grants are for four years. If the price goes up enough
and then relatively flattens out, it can happen that one’s total compensation
begins decreasing after the fourth year. That, and 4-5 years is enough time to
build a sufficiently large safety net that one can attempt to strike out on
one’s own.

------
stinkycatfart
Being a SWE on Ads gave him an inclination to use Google products?!

Honestly I think this highlights how divorced eng is from real world usage,
otherwise he'd know this shit happens. every.damn.day.

ad tech is a house of cards and makes me reconsider working at Google every
day.

~~~
temp20160423
You work on ads at Google and feel that ad tech is a house of cards?

I actually disagree, primarily because of the auction. It's an incredibly
clever way to ensure Google's incentives are aligned with the advertisers'.
Assuming rational bidders, Google can only charge more per click if the clicks
deliver more value to the advertisers. If Google just sends a bunch of garbage
clicks to the advertisers, they will just lower their bids.

------
spencey
OP, how did you track location? If it's IP address then it could be someone in
the US using a VPN. If I'm on T-mobile my IP says I'm in Seattle so DFP will
show me ads for Seattle but I'm in SF.

------
izacus
So HN wants Google not to track prople but still exactly and completely
accurately know the location of each and every one of them for Ad targeting?

That sounds incompatible.

~~~
ifdefdebug
What about just not serving the ad to an IP in Turkey without even looking at
the person using it?

~~~
pas
How reliable is IP geolocating nowadays?

~~~
nl
It's pretty reliable outside some known bad blocks.

------
moomin
Gotta wonder if there’s a point where people just stop paying for this
nonsense.

------
nartz
This is completely deceptive, especially showing them as from the US!!! I
imagine 90% of AdWords users are not aware of this. Thank you for writing
this!

------
unreal37
I'm surprised that you're surprised.

You worked for Google. You should have known this before today.

~~~
pheug
Why exactly should he have known this, especially as an SWE? Google is a
gigantic 110k+ people company by now. It's totally possibly to spend years
head deep in code specializing on some obscure parts of codebase with near
zero understanding how everything else works outside of your narrow area of
focus.

~~~
tobltobs
He has been working for two years in the AdWords team. Sure it is possible to
work somewhere for two years and don't get even an basic understanding of the
product, but it is unsurprising if somebody would call that surprising.

------
ifthenelseend
Google is a scam company. Stop using it.

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN?
We've already had to ask you about this, and we ban accounts that keep doing
it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
Akababa
Is it possible that they've detected someone using a proxy and traced them
back to the US?

~~~
zaroth
Not even remotely.

------
paul7986
Just watched this vidoe re: other adword shenigans where Tulsi Gabbard
discusses her suit against Google with Joe Rogan. They suspended her ads and
adwords account during the first democratic debate & never provided a reason.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5o-zqII6eQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5o-zqII6eQ)

