Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
mitxela 58 minutes ago [-]
Lawsuit time!
varispeed 55 minutes ago [-]
I would suspect that entities affected don't have money for a lawsuit.
phenomen 3 hours ago [-]
If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
walrus01 3 hours ago [-]
This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
Grimblewald 2 hours ago [-]
also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.
mitxela 57 minutes ago [-]
No that makes no sense. They only need a tiny device to act as a proxy. It makes no sense to colocate the expensive GPUs
roosterIllusi0n 10 minutes ago [-]
It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.
fluoridation 2 minutes ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the company that owns the compute is the one paying for the power. Who would agree to have an ugly noisy cube in their property that they have to pay maintenance for? What would they get out of that deal?
gruez 2 hours ago [-]
>also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes
Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
walrus01 1 hours ago [-]
My understanding of it so far is that it is at most, 50 or 100 houses as a test... It's a startup that wants to make it wide scale but hasn't got there yet.
Calling them a "hyperscaler" is a stretch. By all accounts it's some renewables startup that's trying to pivot into AI because obviously AI = $$$, and calling themselves a "hyperscaler" in the process. Calling them a "hyperscaler" makes as much sense as some guy who runs a homelab in his basement as a "datacenter".
Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io)
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
nekusar 3 hours ago [-]
Yep.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
Residential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.
ForHackernews 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
xp84 26 minutes ago [-]
ehh, subvert is a stretch. But yes, you too can be a minor accessory to scams run by thieves to rob advertisers, with enriching the world's largest ad company as a side-effect. Not exactly a Robin Hood situation given that tons of the advertisers being robbed are just normal small developers trying to get their apps out there.
warkdarrior 1 hours ago [-]
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
These residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.
mitxela 54 minutes ago [-]
Sounds awesome, what's the catch?
rao-v 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't this the sort of thing Google is supposed to be doing for us?
autoexec 2 hours ago [-]
What incentive do they have to do that kind of work? They get paid anyway and they've basically got no competition
ricardonunez 2 hours ago [-]
I agree but that will eliminate a big cash cow for them.
harry8 3 hours ago [-]
Why can’t Google do this? Surely their data is better than yours.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
20k 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
n0us 3 hours ago [-]
Taking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road.
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
GeneralMayhem 1 hours ago [-]
Google's AdSpam/fraud/bot-prevention team was, when I worked there, world class and fairly well funded, took their job seriously, and had access to all the data. It's an existential threat to the ad business, because if Google gets a reputation for being full of bots/spam, then the advertisers will bid lower per click/conversion to compensate, which means that legitimate website publishers will get paid less and go to other networks, which is a feedback loop that leads to the entire market collapsing (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons). It's absolutely worth refunding/zero-rating huge amounts of advertiser spend to avoid that situation, and they do.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
BLKNSLVR 47 minutes ago [-]
Just to be clear, this is different to the problem of Google ads that link to malware and fake banking websites and promotion of cryptocurrency scams isn't it?
n0us 1 hours ago [-]
Fair, I retract my cynical conjecture
brudgers 2 hours ago [-]
Alphabet has claimed to be fighting ad fraud for many many years.
That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.
Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.
I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
it's also just flat-out unsexy from a product/MBA-brained perspective to push for something that will negatively impact metrics for your users. I ran into this when I was advocating for onboarding a third-party provider that would filter out automated/spambot email clicks thus decreasing the north star metrics our users had for engagement (even though it was truthier and would provide more accurate targeting and some of our most senior people had been advocating for for years)
the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing
and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
mitxela 51 minutes ago [-]
also observe that Musk did the opposite, counting any attention whatsoever on a tweet as a view, such as a 1 pixel sliver appearing at the bottom of the viewport as you scroll, boosting numbers and all the Twitter posting addicts praised him for it when he did it
pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago [-]
I mean if you could show Google know they're charging people for ads they're knowingly showing to robots then a few €Billion of fines for fraud should be following.
javcasas 2 hours ago [-]
Because doing this would reduce their profits.
walrus01 1 hours ago [-]
Admitting in public how bad the bot and fraud problem would be, metaphorically speaking, shooting their primary revenue source in the dick.
Yeah if there's a DB that would be helpful - I'm not currently capturing the IP, but I'll see if I can add it in a future release.
jasondigitized 3 hours ago [-]
+1
gerdesj 25 minutes ago [-]
I suggest that Google should be doing that job for you.
It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself.
In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?
nla 1 hours ago [-]
That should be an RPZ feed!
sidewndr46 3 hours ago [-]
Couldn't you just give up on the main business and sell this list as a service?
varispeed 54 minutes ago [-]
Why Google can't detect it by themselves?
benoau 3 hours ago [-]
Why doesn't Google do this automatically? /s
inkubus 3 hours ago [-]
rrsidential procies sre thery cheap
dave_sid 3 hours ago [-]
Google ads are a con. Meta ads are a con. If someone tells you you’re just not doing it right yet, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
G3nD 3 hours ago [-]
Are pretty much all ecommerce brands wasting their money on Meta ads? Seems hard to believe.
pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago [-]
Meta ads are mostly obvious fraud afaict - unregistered lotteries, jet washes that don't need power, flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them, household goods developed by NASA, air-conditioning/heating that doesn't need outside air and plugs direct into a socket, ...
I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.
What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
kibwen 17 minutes ago [-]
Why's it hard to believe? Look around you at how belligerently foolish, irrational, inefficient, dysfunctional, and confidently wrong every large organization acts. Marketing departments confidently report that their marketing campaigns work, because to report otherwise would be to have their budget slashed to zero. Ad networks confidently report that the ads you buy are effective, because to report otherwise would destroy their companies. Ads are just a tax on the consumer which result in no improvement to any product whatsoever, a pure rent-seeking middleman, an intellectual landlord, a red queen's race, a dead weight on the economy, and, of course, a trillion-dollar industry, because we live in hell.
bluegatty 2 hours ago [-]
yes, they are wasting money, they know it, but caveats:
famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'
'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.
so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.
but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.
so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.
the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.
this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.
large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.
the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.
there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.
sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.
but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.
the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.
im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.
the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.
companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.
It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.
so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.
it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.
our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
G3nD 2 hours ago [-]
So the gigantic incumbents with retail distribution being inefficient makes sense to me. What about the long tail of D2C brands that live on Meta ads? AFAIK, they live and die by their ROAS. I would have to believe that these companies just don't really exist to buy that Meta ads are a "con".
bluegatty 1 hours ago [-]
the roi is better at smaller corps that pay attention, but you would still be surprised.
and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.
note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.
but startups and other companies ... not the same.
well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.
but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.
the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.
also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
miohtama 29 minutes ago [-]
Guess why we are getting “age verification” everywhere, lobbied by Meta.
It is not to protect the children.
nostrademons 3 hours ago [-]
It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them.
It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
gruez 1 hours ago [-]
>the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap
I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
mitxela 47 minutes ago [-]
What did gas cost a year ago and what does it cost now?
gruez 30 minutes ago [-]
And...? The CPI is a weighted basket. Gas costing 2x (or whatever) doesn't mean CPI is 2x. Is that hard of a concept to grasp?
dakolli 2 hours ago [-]
Probably the most succinct description of this phenomenon I've seen in a long time.
cube00 1 hours ago [-]
Add Reddit Ads to that, all the alleged clicks not one comment or conversion.
I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
emdash 32 minutes ago [-]
I have a theory that there are far fewer genuine users on Reddit at this point than you'd expect.
raincom 2 hours ago [-]
If one runs a small business, one has to pay Google/Meta; otherwise, their businesses will be bottom of the search. It is a tax now.
dam_jackalopes 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, I think you're correct in most cases but they work relatively well for our property leasing office. There's a convergence of factors at work there though; small number of high priced products being offered to a relatively small number of people in a certain geo location.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
Not limited to ads.
heap_perms 2 hours ago [-]
this is the only correct response.
dzohrob 2 hours ago [-]
idk, i’ve spent six figures on meta ads in the last few months and gotten tons of real users for my app. how is that a con?
wyre 2 hours ago [-]
How has been the return? 6 figs is a lot if your users aren't earning you that money back.
jay_kyburz 1 hours ago [-]
I dabbled with this 10-15 years ago.
I always ignore all numbers on the dashboard. All I care about is how much I paid, and how much revenue went up in following weeks.
I never could quite get that number positive.
cube00 1 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the "you're not spending enough" excuse, Reddit loves to use that one me.
jLaForest 3 hours ago [-]
This was also my experience wasting $1500 on Google ads
reddalo 2 hours ago [-]
The main problem with Google Ads is that Google tries to squeeze money out of you in all possible ways.
I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:
- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)
- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)
- disable AI Max
- disable all automations
- reject any of their "optimization" tips
- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you
In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do.
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
myth2018 2 hours ago [-]
Also: run experiments to find an "optimal" budget with the right size for your target audience. If you, e.g., set a too restrictive geographic rule, but also set a budget higher than what they manage to burn showing your ads at the area you defined, they will override the rules you set up to guarantee 100% of your money will be burnt.
cube00 1 hours ago [-]
> only enable Google Search ads
Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
pseudonymidy 2 hours ago [-]
Your post led me to install your app and play through 10 puzzles. The post doesn’t even show the app!
What’s the name for this sort of marketing?
I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
nickabe 4 minutes ago [-]
Thanks very much - really means a lot that you enjoyed it, we put a lot of effort into making it.
Knowing your audience, and captivating them at grassroot level or in an unexpected place, without making it feel scummy (sometimes)?
Guerrilla marketing.
rybosworld 3 hours ago [-]
I've suspected that google has been turning a blind eye to ad fraud for a few years now. In the early-mid 2010's, ad fraud wasn't nearly as common.
And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
econ 2 hours ago [-]
You had huge click farms back in the days.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
mitxela 45 minutes ago [-]
Those work. You'll remember that brand if you ever need that product.
sethops1 2 hours ago [-]
These bug me so much. Those 20+ minute ads do nothing but piss me off. I have to grab the remote or switch tabs or whatever to get past them. To the point where I'm on the verge of adding YT to the permanent block list along with Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.
xp84 16 minutes ago [-]
Serious question: Do you watch a lot of YouTube? Why not just cough up the $16 for YouTube Premium? Creators actually do get paid more for Premium users' views than they do from adsense. You get to see none of these ads that piss you off.
Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.
But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
> It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
legonigel 4 hours ago [-]
What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
Sayrus 3 hours ago [-]
The bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application.
In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.
wilbo 3 hours ago [-]
I'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean:
Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.
r_lee 3 hours ago [-]
yes,
in short, people/entities with websites employ bots to click and interact with the Google Ads on their website to generate fake ad revenue.
and the person running the ad campaign is billed for those fake interactions.
I'm guessing app ads are heavily botted because they're more costly vs. a simple ad that lands you on a website (edit: I was wrong, see reply by OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665323)
taylorfinley 3 hours ago [-]
Nailed it. It's a microcosm of the entire economy. Success percolates to the least scrupulous, at the expense of everyone else.
x0x0 2 hours ago [-]
That's it. The scammers display ads. Two scams: one is mostly or entirely artificial traffic; a second is eg low quality ad slots disguised as higher quality. For the latter, think ads in videos shown off screen with programmatic interaction to make it appear as if the legit traffic saw and interacted with the ads.
aucisson_masque 2 hours ago [-]
That’s why you display ads only on the Google search webpages.
It’s been known for decades that third party website are just lost money.
And then, even Google own pages get clicked by bots but this time from competitors so you spend all your budget and they get cheap auctions.
3 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
codazoda 1 hours ago [-]
I once did this by accident and without a bot farm. It was very lucrative.
What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.
I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.
xp84 14 minutes ago [-]
That's definitely a core principle of crapware that's widely done. Put that ad 0px away from the "mash here like crazy" button, PROFIT!
mitxela 44 minutes ago [-]
Could be black-hat vulnerability scanners and so on.
rationalist 3 hours ago [-]
One reason: It helps makes the bot accounts look more legit. It's why Facebook bot accounts like random legit pages.
LoganDark 3 hours ago [-]
This was my thought too. It's easy to pretend to click one ad in order to make that ad money. But it's also easy for Google to tell apart a huge number of accounts that all clicked that one ad and no others. However, if a huge number of accounts simply click a whole load of ads there's basically no way to tell that it was targeted at any particular ad + they can bot for multiple ads at once.
toast0 3 hours ago [-]
Have to do the install to get paid for the ad click, right?
nickabe 3 hours ago [-]
Surprisingly, no. 29 of the 30 zero-time installs had no click at all; Google credited them to someone watching the video. The install isn't what gets the farm paid. It's what makes Google's bidding think that placement is working, so it sends it more of your ads.
bliteben 3 hours ago [-]
likely they run an ad intelligence operation which requires them to click to see where the ads lead
blitzar 3 hours ago [-]
upping the clickthrough rate on a low quality property to get paid for fake ad impressions?
yalok 4 hours ago [-]
this is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition...
From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.
And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
shepardrtc 3 hours ago [-]
"Bots? In my ecosystem?"
XCSme 2 hours ago [-]
This will always remind me of the post I made 10 years ago, with Facebook ads being 100% robots...
With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.
Sorry, I am new here, but who funds that bot farm? i don't get it
chung8123 1 hours ago [-]
At this point you have to just factor bots into your marketing costs. You have to go by overall cost per acquisition not cost per click.
xnx 3 hours ago [-]
Switch to a pay app and the problem goes away.
ebx 39 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean by a pay app?
xnx 22 minutes ago [-]
If "Dayzle" (the app being advertised?) cost $5 to install, bot downloads would stop immediately.
MiroslavPokorny 1 hours ago [-]
Dont worry, bots are the new rich, just look at the trillion dollar AI companies.
gsky 1 hours ago [-]
Google cheats publishers also. all big companies are evil these days
odie5533 2 hours ago [-]
Did they like your app?
erwan577 3 hours ago [-]
The app appears unavailable in France in Google Play is that expected ? My phone is a pixel.
nickabe 2 minutes ago [-]
Yeah sorry - adding it to Europe probably next week though.
vedmed 43 minutes ago [-]
80% of my web traffic is bots even mom and pop shops
fHr 3 hours ago [-]
Google promoting scams via ads 24 7 these days
guywithahat 4 hours ago [-]
> I’ll report back on the refund.
Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
nickabe 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks, and agreed. The in-app goal was the lesson, and I'd rather have learned it at $220 than at a trial-run budget. The part I found interesting is that Google's count wasn't wrong: there really were 21 installs. You only saw the problem by looking at which version of the app they installed. The YC advice is roughly where I've ended up too. And fair point on the refund, I'm not holding my breath, but I'll report back either way.
alfiedotwtf 3 hours ago [-]
Who would waste their time running a bot farm just to click ads? Almost sounds like Google are paying these farms
compiler-guy 3 hours ago [-]
People who own the click farms who get paid to run the ads when they are clicked on.
This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.
PunchyHamster 3 hours ago [-]
Ok but normally, the ads are on site, site owner pays click farms to click the ads, he earns on the difference between ad revenue and click cost.
How does that work for an app that's just some game ?
wswin 1 hours ago [-]
the same way, app is the advertised products
carlosjobim 3 hours ago [-]
Digital marketing is a solved problem. You pay a commission on verified real sales to affiliates, and they can do what the hell they please to make those sales. If somebody like Google or Meta cannot promise X amount of sales for Y amount of ad money spent, then you are a fool to give them any money. They have all the algorithms and profiles on everybody, so it's their job to match your product to customers. Why should you have to tweak who will be targeted?
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
Dwedit 3 hours ago [-]
Honey says Hi.
aetherspawn 3 hours ago [-]
You kind of said everything but nothing all at once. If not Google then where?
carlosjobim 3 hours ago [-]
Depends on what you're selling. If you do it right, Google will give you plenty of organic customers who want to buy your product - no ads needed. You can market as much as you want on Meta also without having to pay for ads.
But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
rybosworld 3 hours ago [-]
SEO is not nearly as effective as it used to be. Organic click through rates have been trending way down since AI responses were added to the top of the search results. So this really isn't just a case of "you're holding it wrong".
mitxela 39 minutes ago [-]
How's GEO?
carlosjobim 52 minutes ago [-]
If you're selling something, you love having the AI talking about your product. The move to AI is not a negative for businesses wanting to reach customers organically - on the contrary.
sergiotapia 3 hours ago [-]
How much of Google's revenue is just scams?
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
Fugazi!
Barbing 3 hours ago [-]
Otherwise their competitor gets top billing for their very own brand name. See this on Apple’s App Store too. Feels very unfair.
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
They’re selling a limited ad-space - again, instead of to their competitor.
In that context: suggest a fairer way.
Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!
signumhq 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
atuladhar 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 00:22:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
1. Dev publishes app with Google Admob integration to the Play Store.
2. Buys Google Ads to drive traffic to the app.
3. Google Admob bans his account for invalid traffic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admob/comments/1vzg3fu/i_paid_googl...
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...
https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.
Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.
I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing
and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
It is absolutely ridiculous that you have been either victim shamed, blamed or simply neglected by Google into doing it yourself.
In a mall, you expect to see mall cops ... where are they?
I've reported a few to Advertising Standards in the UK, but they're not really interested in combatting Facebook/Amazon fraud.
What's hilarious is having reported an ad to Facebook, they show you that ad more because you didn't longer looking at it. Mad.
famous saying 'i'd cut my ad budget in 1/2 if i knew which 1/2 to cut'
'attribution' is the holy grail of hard thing in marketing.
so they know for sure the channel spend is iffy.
but it's hard to measure, esp. for brand and indirect campaigns.
so as a 'starting point' - it's a very 'noisy channel problem'.
the next wild idea is that ads come from a marketing budget which has $X to spend, and they have to spend it.
this is where the ROI stuff is wildy upside down.
large companies with 'market power' have a lot of surplus. they put that towards relatively lucreative marketing. the $ must be spent.
the cmo makes a budget, allocates, the managers follow the campaign, front line staffers spend. they try to get the best results they can.
there is often an unbelievable lack of true roi concern in all of that.
sometimes it's very aggressive, aka for some keywords, for sure.
but a remarkable amount of $ is spent in very unnacountable way, over what are 'grey' channels anyhow.
the marketing ops person is going home at 5pm and does not care one bit about bots. they were paid to spend it, they did. Facebook is paid to 'show a chart of view' ... they did that. 'everyone is happy'.
im not saying the whole system works that way, but much of it does.
the wild part is - there is so much 'dumb big money' in ads, it makes the whole thing very inneficient.
companies like P&G have 'distribution monopolies' on so many packaged goods, they have to keep up brand awareness.
It's why so many commercials are for commodity products like home stuff - the market is huge, the market channels are locked, they pay $$$ for ads for 'toothpaste' - the least novel and least productive kind of thing imaginable.
so 'Colgate' costs $5 at the store, it costs 50 cents to manufacture - that $4.50 gross margin is stuffed into a system of relative inneficiency up and down the economy. much of it in 'nearly useless ads'.
it's a deep market inefficiency people dont want to recognized because people assume private capital is inherently efficient and that a dollar spent = GDP = value and that's it.
our lives could materially be improved if we banned ads for a lot of things - feels like 'socialism' but really it'd just be about a kind of 'regulated market efficiency'.
and where it is more efficient its where there is better attribution models aka direct sales.
note: there are certain kinds of products that are 100% 'click driven sales'. they zero brand awareness, they want to sell you that 'fleece hoodie' on the spot. those guys have their funnel math down solid.
but startups and other companies ... not the same.
well funded startups burn $ thinking it's productive - and hugely: buying fake customers, or, spending $2 to get $1 in revenue to either pad the books, show investors, make themselves feel good or 'strategic'. FYI 'strategic' is often rational. those are big pools of money.
but usually campaigns are mixed and attribution is hard, even for smaller companies.
the tighter the budget, the more 'direct purchase', the more 'nominally efficient' it is.
also note - most ad $ is big companies who ironically spend a smaller share of their revenue on ads <- this is the power of scale.
It is not to protect the children.
It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.
I went through the CPI basket[1] and vaguely looked for categories "life's necessities" and came up with "Food and beverages", "Shelter", "Fuels and utilities", "Transportation", "Medical care", "Education and communication". Those categories alone make up 85.3% of the basket, and I didn't even bother going into detailed categories to look for other essentials. "Televisions" on the other hand makes up 0.1%. I'm sure there's more non-essentials on there, but 85% of the CPI basket being non-essentials seems... pretty reasonable? If anything, it's weighted more towards essentials than typical consumer spending patterns.
I get my app is probably bad but you'd expect at least one comment out of 100 "clicks" to say something.
I always ignore all numbers on the dashboard. All I care about is how much I paid, and how much revenue went up in following weeks.
I never could quite get that number positive.
I think the only sane way tu run a Google Ads campaign is to:
- only enable Google Search ads (i.e. disable all third-party publishers -- this may be a bit extreme but it's good if you're advertisting a niche product that people are actually searching for)
- only use "exact match" keywords ("broad match" is so broad that Google will show your ads in completely unrelevant SERPs)
- disable AI Max
- disable all automations
- reject any of their "optimization" tips
- set a max CPC even if they say it's bad for you
In other words, reject everything they suggest you to do. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this only works for my use case, but that's how I've been using Google Ads succesfully without wasting money.
Except then they just don't run your ads unless you're willing to pay silly amounts like $3 per click for bot traffic.
What’s the name for this sort of marketing?
I really like the interface you’ve built for completing the puzzles. Very clean - it’s very nice to not be bombarded at every screen.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
Guerrilla marketing.
And it's absolutely not the case that google can't detect ad fraud - in fact they are VERY good at detecting it when they want to.
Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%
The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?
Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?
Look, I run UBlock Origin myself. But that's because there's zero other way to look at any Web content without going insane with videos and other garbage popping all over the place, and even when sites have memberships, I use too many distinct ones anyway, and the memberships may not remove the ads and junk.
But when it comes to sites like YouTube that let me choose between "ads" and "non-ads" experiences... I guess I'm just saying I see a ton of ROI on the $16.
This is the opposite of resourcefulness - unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.
PS Genuine question: where is the fraud in a 20 minute ad?
Steve Balmer explaining his take on how local governments of the US work was a hilarious ad offering on my non-adblocked device the other day - I’m struggling to see vectors for fraud.
In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.
Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.
in short, people/entities with websites employ bots to click and interact with the Google Ads on their website to generate fake ad revenue.
and the person running the ad campaign is billed for those fake interactions.
I'm guessing app ads are heavily botted because they're more costly vs. a simple ad that lands you on a website (edit: I was wrong, see reply by OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665323)
It’s been known for decades that third party website are just lost money.
And then, even Google own pages get clicked by bots but this time from competitors so you spend all your budget and they get cheap auctions.
What I did was create a game with an action button. Then I served ads right next to the action button. I didn’t realize people would miss click on the ads at a high rate, but they did. They fat fingered it, clicked the ad, I got paid.
I looked into it after a couple weeks because my click rate was crazy high.
From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.
And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
With a small budget, in 15 years I never managed to get any positive ROI on any online platform I tried advertising on.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...
[0] https://novc.fyi/why
Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
This type of fraud is almost as old as web ads themselves.
How does that work for an app that's just some game ?
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
But if you need stronger marketing than that, there will always be willing affiliates.
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
Fugazi!
In that context: suggest a fairer way.
Now, it may just be you don’t like advertising in this context - a valid take. But a different one!