
Are you wasting your AdWords budget on in-app ads? - hermitcrab
http://successfulsoftware.net/2014/06/25/are-you-wasting-your-adwords-budget-on-in-app-ads/
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makmanalp
I mean, isn't this advertising 101? If you put an ad for something in front of
an audience that won't buy it, you're going to get terrible performance. If
you're selling $1000 b2b software, don't advertise on flappy bird.

[https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722057?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722057?hl=en)

edit: I guess the contentious point here is why they enable non-specific in-
app ads by default.

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crazypyro
Not only did they enable non-specific in-app ads by default, they apparently
also automatically enabled it for all existing ad campaigns. I think that's
the key takeaway?

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Silhouette
Right now, I'm wondering how anyone gets any sensible results out of Google
Display Network advertising at all. I had my first and, for the foreseeable
future, probably last experience with them recently.

Despite running ads in a style that worked well on other ad networks, using
highly specific terms to target the site's niche audience, for a site that
generally gets excellent engagement once people find it, there was literally
0% engagement from GDN visitors. Not a single person so much as visited a
second page, according to Google's own statistics.

It turned out that most of the ads were being shown on pages that seemed to
have little if any obvious connection to any of the targeting terms. The top
referrer even had the small print, low contrast, keyword spam at the top of
the page (Viagra, payday loans, that kind of stuff) that I thought everyone
gave up on years ago. And Google had the audacity to charge us for that
traffic.

Our solution is simple: We no longer have an AdWords budget, and we've
cancelled all our other Google-related to-do items in favour of various other
on-line channels.

~~~
hermitcrab
There are thousands of scammy websites trying to game the system. It would be
very hard for Google to keep on top of it, even if they really wanted to.

There is also the issue that Display ads are 'old school' interruption based
advertising. They are never going to get the same sort of engagement and
conversion rates that well targetted Search ads get.

Also I guess most of the websites with good quality content charge advertisers
direct, rather than getting chump change from Google Display ads.

~~~
Silhouette
_There are thousands of scammy websites trying to game the system. It would be
very hard for Google to keep on top of it, even if they really wanted to._

Sure, I can understand one or two getting through. But just looking down the
top referrers from Google's own stats, _almost none of them_ appeared to be
related to the chosen target terms in this case.

 _There is also the issue that Display ads are 'old school' interruption based
advertising. They are never going to get the same sort of engagement and
conversion rates that well targetted Search ads get._

Yes, GDN is "old school" advertising, but that doesn't explain a _total_ lack
of engagement from the visitors. Other on-line advertising channels have been
used to promote the same site, including multiple variants of display
advertising using almost exactly the same ad styles and targeting strategies.
Some seem to be more successful than others after the first few experiments,
but all of them consistently achieve fair to very good engagement levels.

I almost have to think that something went wrong here, because I don't
understand how Google can still be in business if our experience is typical of
the results they can offer. Perhaps it works better for sites with less
specific audiences or for big name brands. Still, if that is the best Google
can do for a niche site with very targeted terms, it has literally no value as
an advertising channel for us.

~~~
hermitcrab
Maybe a significant proportion of the clicks you got were from click farms or
bots, who were working for the benfit of the site hosting the ads (and
incidentally making lots of money for Google)?

I have had much better results with Search ads.

~~~
Silhouette
_Maybe a significant proportion of the clicks you got were from click farms or
bots_

Given the obvious keyword spam I mentioned on one of the top referring sites,
that wouldn't surprise me at all. But again, if Google are that bad at dealing
with fraudulent clicks, we're going to make that their problem rather than
ours!

 _I have had much better results with Search ads._

Google search ads are actually our second worst-performing experiment by some
way as far as on-line channels go. However, in fairness to Google, we already
rank on the first page for almost all the targeted terms in our current
strategy anyway, so it is entirely possible that any keywords generic enough
to be useful on top of that are also broad enough to be the wrong scale for
our needs.

A more interesting contrast for us is the results from advertising say via
Facebook (targeting similar interests/demographics) or via individual ads
we've placed directly with a few established sites relevant to our target
audience. Those channels should be directly comparable to GDN, yet all of them
have consistently performed vastly better.

~~~
hermitcrab
Have you check the 'Dimensions>Search terms' report to check the phrases your
ads appear for (which won't be the same as those you bid on, unless you are
only using exact match) are well targetted?

Another common mistake I have seen is to advertise expensive English-language
products to people not searching in English in poor countries.

It is so easy to make mistakes in AdWords.

~~~
Silhouette
Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't think anything like that could explain
our poor results specifically with Google. We did keep an eye on the actual
terms in the search ads and knock out a couple of genuinely related things
that aren't any good for this specific site, and similarly we started looking
at manually removing bad placements with the GDN ads until it became obvious
that it was futile. Also, all the ads were targeted by country (and similarly
for the other channels I mentioned, where applicable) so again there's no
reason performance on Google should have been so much worse than every other
on-line channel we use.

I've just noticed that Google e-mailed us with a phone number we could call
for "free support and advice from an AdWords expert". Might be good for a
laugh (or a refund, not that we let them near very much money anyway).

~~~
hermitcrab
I have heard from others that the quality of advice from their AdWords
'experts' is very variable. So I would be skeptical about whatever they
suggest.

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k1w1
We went through exactly the same thing ([http://blog.aha.io/index.php/pissing-
away-our-money-with-goo...](http://blog.aha.io/index.php/pissing-away-our-
money-with-google-display-ads/)).

You can opt out of the in-app ads completely by adding
"adsenseformobileapps.com" to the excluded domains.

~~~
hermitcrab
Useful to know there is a (rather obscure) opt-out and also that you were able
to get money back from Google. Thanks.

