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Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US

419 点作者 siggi超过 5 年前

26 条评论

tomaszs超过 5 年前
Google changed it lately without any special notification. Unfortunately. There are more things to watch out.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And so on... I am working on Google Ads campaigns for several years now. Always say to my client two things:<p>1) Google and Facebook will spent every penny you want to spend<p>2) Spend on ads only such amount on money, you can live without, and keep it running for a longer time without interruption.<p>3) Optimise often
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tehwebguy超过 5 年前
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.<p>Did you read the fine print? Doesn’t matter, you can’t redline it anyway so it’s take it or leave it.
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oceliker超过 5 年前
I&#x27;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&#x27;m there.<p>Clicks outside the US are not necessarily meaningless -- the screenshot in the article shows that they are targeting people &quot;regularly in the US&quot;. Just because I left for a couple of weeks does not mean I abandoned everything related to where I live. There&#x27;s still value in targeting US ads to me, independent of my current location.
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tyingq超过 5 年前
Sounds like excluding all other countries is the only solution.<p>Google does provide a CSV with all the AdWords recognized countries: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;adwords&#x2F;api&#x2F;docs&#x2F;appendix&#x2F;geotargeting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;adwords&#x2F;api&#x2F;docs&#x2F;appendix&#x2F;geot...</a><p>You should be able to copy the list to the clipboard and paste into the exclusion list.
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asadkn超过 5 年前
Never rely on Google Ads to be honest. They are unlikely to respond at all.<p>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&#x27;t working.<p>Booked a consultation with one of their so-called &quot;Experts&quot;, he couldn&#x27;t find anything wrong and suggested to contact support again.<p>After the initial 10 days response, still waiting for a reply from so-called support 20 days later. I&#x27;d assume support only exists for companies that spend millions a year.
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emn13超过 5 年前
I mean, this all sounds sort of like a reasonable complaint... until you get to the sample size: 3 clicks.<p>It appears arguably reasonable that geotargeting isn&#x27;t exact, nor is it clear that these clicks weren&#x27;t actually real and valuable. If he&#x27;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超过 5 年前
Well... some people based in the US travel outside of the US sometimes.
ilamont超过 5 年前
That&#x27;s the Google AdWords way ... <i>by default</i>, include people &quot;interested in&quot; 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 <i>AdWords Dimensions &gt; Geographic</i>, but not sure what it is now.<p>If you call them on it, the Google phone reps will say with a straight face, “Let&#x27;s say people with family in Moldova want to look for something to tell their relatives in the U.S.”<p>The ethical way for Google to handle this would be to make all U.S. campaigns <i>by default</i> 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&#x27;t make it the default.<p>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&#x27;s guidance, and they&#x27;re lucky if 10% of clicks end up being target customers living in the same area. Often they have no clue about what&#x27;s going on, and wonder why their campaigns are costing so much for only a trickle of real customers.
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cpsempek超过 5 年前
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<p>1. Buy AdWords ads in countries out of Bing’s coverage,<p>2. Send these clicks to a page serving your Bing feed’s ads for same&#x2F;similar keyword search,<p>3. Realize Bing US CPCs on international AdWords ad buys
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JCharante超过 5 年前
I mean it says right there that they may also be people regularly in the US. I don&#x27;t see why I&#x27;m less of a marketable audience for a SaaS when I&#x27;m abroad.
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GordonS超过 5 年前
A bit OT, but does anyone have any advice on improving page relevancy quality scores?<p>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.<p>I&#x27;ve been through the usual guides, and I can&#x27;t find anything actionable - they all basically boil down to &quot;have relevant content&quot; - but I <i>do</i>, dammit!<p>I&#x27;ve also taken up Google&#x27;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 &quot;writing relevant content&quot;, even though both agreed that the content seemed very relevant to them.<p>The site has been rewritten from scratch a couple of times over the years - no change.<p>I even paid a copywriter a couple of years back, but the tweaked content still resulted in the same 2-4 quality scores.<p>I&#x27;m considering switching to a different domain, closing the AdWords account and opening a new one, but I&#x27;ve no idea if that would actually change anything.
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appleiigs超过 5 年前
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.
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Simon_says超过 5 年前
I&#x27;m really skeptical of the narrative that Alphabet et. al. have brilliant, super-precise targeting of ads. I&#x27;m an American who only speaks English, but I&#x27;m currently living in a non-English-speaking country. Youtube <i>constantly</i> serves me videos in a language I don&#x27;t understand. Mostly, I don&#x27;t even understand what product is trying to be sold to me, and for the minority where the product is clear, I don&#x27;t understand the arguments, and I&#x27;ll never buy these things, anyways.<p>I&#x27;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.
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james_impliu超过 5 年前
I recently created ad campaigns on Twitter&#x2F;Facebook and Google for our startup. The dark patterns like this were shocking. They really taste of short term metric driven growth that doesn&#x27;t consider &quot;now I&#x27;m paying for clicks that will never convert, I&#x27;m going to churn as an account totally&quot;.<p>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&#x27;m sure this would work badly for many other businesses. We only found it by digging into the campaign stats once it had launched.<p>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.
ben_jones超过 5 年前
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?
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JeremyMorgan超过 5 年前
So glad I&#x27;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.<p>Don&#x27;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.<p>You have to tolerate an accepted amount of cruft with any PPC campaign.
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wolco超过 5 年前
The wording makes targetting useless.<p>But other questions came up.<p>Why do so many quit google after less than five years?<p>How does a company who&#x27;s product is a push notification when someone clicks get funding?
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stinkycatfart超过 5 年前
Being a SWE on Ads gave him an inclination to use Google products?!<p>Honestly I think this highlights how divorced eng is from real world usage, otherwise he&#x27;d know this shit happens. every.damn.day.<p>ad tech is a house of cards and makes me reconsider working at Google every day.
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spencey超过 5 年前
OP, how did you track location? If it&#x27;s IP address then it could be someone in the US using a VPN. If I&#x27;m on T-mobile my IP says I&#x27;m in Seattle so DFP will show me ads for Seattle but I&#x27;m in SF.
izacus超过 5 年前
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?<p>That sounds incompatible.
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moomin超过 5 年前
Gotta wonder if there’s a point where people just stop paying for this nonsense.
nartz超过 5 年前
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超过 5 年前
I&#x27;m surprised that you&#x27;re surprised.<p>You worked for Google. You should have known this before today.
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ifthenelseend超过 5 年前
Google is a scam company. Stop using it.
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Akababa超过 5 年前
Is it possible that they&#x27;ve detected someone using a proxy and traced them back to the US?
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paul7986超过 5 年前
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 &amp; never provided a reason.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=w5o-zqII6eQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=w5o-zqII6eQ</a>