We had a similar issue with Reddit, spent $500 and got a lot of clicks - none of them ever did anything else, not even by mistake. When we reported this behavior to Reddit, the rep who helped us set up the campaign just vanished. No answer. After a while, another rep came out and asked if we were interested in advertising on Reddit. Explained the situation and... poof! this other rep disappeared too.
My feeling is that this is systemic, and basically it's the very business model. I remember the first account explaining how the initial budget should be a few thousand dollars, so that "the AI could target effectively". It did target effectively - our wallet.
I've worked in different parts of the online ad industry for years. This is correct: fraud is a systemic and convenient part of the business model. The victims are the advertisers, who's in-house marketers don't know enough to detect/call out fraud.
Google itself forces advertisers into fraud-friendly products like PMAX. Then, when you detect the fraud, the hapless account rep says "ummm... maybe try using IP exclusion lists?" (Like one of the comments below). Google, with all the data it collects on people who click the ads, wants you to catch sophisticated fraud networks by manually building up IP blocklists. Yeah right.
And the victim of this entire ecosystem is your clever YC startup.
Has anyone ever had any success building a digital products business with pay-per-click ads? We're always tempted and dabble, and every bit of traffic seems accidental, completely disinterested or obviously a spammer clicking around trying to collect the "conversion".
Making PPC ads work is an enormous skill and some small business deciding to throw their keywords into Google Ad Manager is a sure fire way to lose your shirt. It is very, very, very hard to make a profit off PPC.
Yes, of course people have built a successful promotion engine with PPC. But if there was a repeatable method I could describe to you then, well, I'd be a very rich man!
I always recommend focusing on Sales first, and coming up with a steady, repeatable way to move people from "being aware of your product" to "deal won". With people. Manually.
Only then, when you have a sales funnel that's economically viable, you can start paying to bring more people into it through PPC.
As qingcharles commented, PPC is a fast easy way for big players and fraudsters to fleece you. There is a lot of domain knowledge to build on the path to effective PPC advertising. Here is one piece of practical advice: every ad network has an "opted-in by default" gotcha. Your job is to discover it before you give them a dollar. Sometimes it looks like "relax my targeting criteria for broader reach" that will bring in irrelevant visitors. Sometimes it is "also run my ads on partner sites/off network", those sites will have extreme fraud. Sometimes it looks like "automatically pick the right landing page URL to promote, so I don't have to think for myself" which will drive paid conversions to your Contact Us form.
PMAX is particularly awful because it incentivizes the scammers to actually book meetings with our Sales team, and waste their time with a no-show.
(For anyone unfamiliar with how the PMAX scam works: PMAX will send more ad traffic to sites that perform well for an advertiser. So scammers who own a network of fraudulent sites will fill out that advertisers' forms, register a great conversion rate, and get a lot of ad traffic directed to their network of bot sites. When you spot the fraud, Google will say: "um, maybe put their IPs on the ad blocklist?" like its 1998 and the most sophisticated click fraudsters are the ones who can click their mouse the fastest. Enshittification Endgame.)
I hope Reddit is not charging advertisers per ad video play.
As a mobile reddit user, I’ve noticed that the app treats ads differently than regular posts. They are more sensitive to taps than regular posts and I frequently accidentally trigger ad videos playing by scrolling past them but I never accidentally trigger regular videos.
I've seen this same thing on Instagram. Scrolling normally and then all of the sudden the latest advertiser's site is open. The only interaction they get is the close button. It can't be great for figuring if you're targeting potential sales correctly.
That's assuming you can get your ad seen, plenty of times I've seen Reddit's own ads for advertising on Reddit and I'll never see my ads. So I'm bidding against Reddit on Reddit's own platform.
Reddit is probably the worst of these ad platforms. We had a simple issue: we couldn't set the account that the ad was coming from to be the correct one (we have two Reddit accounts). That's it! So we sent a support email.
That was the beginning of 4, 45 mins sales calls, with full Powerpoint decks and on the spot commitments from us to reach, spend, etc. At the end of each call the rep would promise us that the account issue is escalated and will be fixed before we launch the campaign and would set the time for the next call.
3 weeks in, the account issue is still not fixed and frankly I cannot trust anything they say about their metrics, impressions, CTR or anything else.
I thought reddit would have been a sensible place to advertise our b2b product, that caters to a quite technical audience in a way that is not very friendly to Linkedin targeting.
As someone who used to use it a ton, Reddit is such a shadow of its former self that it's insane. It's actually like 90% bots. Their user growth numbers are all fake. The only real people on there are marketers making fake posts about an issue and commenting using alts and promoting a solution as a form of "AI engine optimization."
Give affiliates 15% commission for any successful sales they make. Then you don't have to think about marketing and you don't have to throw any money into a black hole.
You're asking me to write an entire book. Depends entirely on what you are selling. But the rule of thumb to get good quality partners is that you should contact them instead of the other way around. And if you know your business sector, then you know which are the people and institutions who have a lot of reach.
Some industries have standardized affiliate marketing which you don't have to think about. For example booking.com for hotels or Amazon for retail. They take a percentage of each sale they make for you and that's it. You don't pay them anything except for confirmed sales.
If you chose black hole paid advertising, then at a minimum you should give out different voucher codes on each channel you advertise on, which give customers a 10 or 15% discount. And give voucher codes to friends, family, colleagues and contacts that they can give to anybody they like. That's the only way to find out where the real customers are and where to target your ads.
My feeling is that this is systemic, and basically it's the very business model. I remember the first account explaining how the initial budget should be a few thousand dollars, so that "the AI could target effectively". It did target effectively - our wallet.