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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by pseudonymidy
  • 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.

    by rybosworld
  • 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.
    by legonigel
  • 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.
    by dave_sid
  • I've been in go to market for the better part of 20 years now (anyone remember the DigitalOcean youtube ads of the 2012-2014 era?), paid online advertising has basically gone to shit, it started about 6 years ago, but over the past 3-4 years outside of linkedin it's effectively pointless, over 55% of Americans run ad blockers now and around 40% globally - on top of that, what you do get it mostly just... bots. In January I was helping a friend with some of his GTM efforts, we ran $10k over 3 weeks on meta, google, linkedin and X. On Meta, google and X the sub 1 second bounce rate was around 0.7% and hotjar+raw server logs registered zero activity on 99% of the inbound from those platforms, this was to a multitude of ICP specific landing pages with highly targeted ads AND relatively general targeting to the homepage. LinkedIn does still work, but it has gotten extremely expensive.
    by neom
  • 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.

    by phenomen
  • 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.

    by kimi
  • My favorite story:

    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...

    by yunusabd

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