There's a hidden setting when configuring geo on campaigns.

By default it's set to "People -interested- in your target location" . You need to change it to "People who are -in- your target location".

This setting is hidden under a toggle, so it's very easy to miss. Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.

This is just one of many dark patterns which makes Google Ads effective only for people willing to spend the time tuning and tweaking every single setting.

A big part of the problem is Google themselves - they say always use "broad" keyword matches (and of course it's the default). Broad matches are really not good for most campaigns unless you have an extremely large budget, yet if you read their documentation they heavily encourage it.

While we're at it...

1) Never enable the "auto apply recommendations" setting. If you do, it gives Google free reign to modify your campaigns (this has always resulted in worse performance and more spend in my experience)

2) Never listen to a google ads rep if they call. Once you're spending enough, they'll call you every week trying to convince you to change various settings. 95% of the time their advice is just plain bad. The quality of the advice does increase once you're spending enough and get assigned more senior reps. But even the senior reps are there to get you to spend more money, their job is not to make your campaigns more effective, "ad specialists" are simply sales people in disguise.

"Never listen to a google ads rep if they call."

Excellent advice. I was helping manage an Adwords campaign for an online shop, only had search ads turned on, was carefully watching and tweaking ads and managed to get a pretty decent CTR which had a big impact on cost per click.

I was in a different time zone (15 hours ahead) than the company. I went to bed one night and next morning I checked and found that our CTR had gone through the floor, was way less than 1%. And as a result our cost per click had sky rocketed from 10 to 15 cents to several dollars.

Turns out that a Google ads rep had called the office and convinced someone to turn on display ads, which killed our CTR. Our advertising budget was depleted, our Adwords account had received the dreaded low CTR slap which meant it would be very costly/impossible to get CTR back to a reasonable level. We were done with Adwords.

Things may have changed since then. It was years ago and I haven't touched Adwords since.

> which meant it would be very costly/impossible to get CTR back to a reasonable level

Sorry - is there some kind of hysteresis? You can't revert the setting and get back to exactly where you started?

Once you have thousands of ad impressions with very few clicks, it takes thousands of new impressions at a very high CTR to get your overall account's CTR back to something reasonable. And now that your cost per click has skyrocketed, even if you can get a high CTR for the new impressions your cost has skyrocketed.

That’s a sampling bias. You are confusing how your metrics are affected by the adverse event with how your metrics are now.

No confusion. I've been through this with several accounts I helped manage. Once an account has a history of low CTR the CPC goes up. Starting a new campaign doesn't help; the CPC stays high until you can get the CTR back up. And that costs dearly.

But again, that was years ago. Things may have changed.

Unfortunately, things have not changed. You are 100% correct. If anything, things have gotten worse, because now we have even fewer options to manage accounts.

So there's no way to set over which period the metrics are calculated?

Or is it a thing where the client only cares about the default metrics calculated over the full history of an account?

It’s on Google’s end. “I have inventory (a placement) to sell to an advertiser. I can sell it to X with a CTR of (10% or 1%) and a CPC of $0.50 or to Y with a CTR of 3% and a CPC of $1.”

Whether X’s CTR is 10% (what it used to be) or 1% (what it is now) drives the decision of which ad is better to serve in that inventory slot.

There are some misconceptions here (i.e. display CTR effects search ads quality score)

Here are some direct from the source help pages that might clear up your understanding of the system. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/156066 https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167118

The GP does not appear to have any misconceptions.

From your first link, "how relevant your ad text is to searches, how likely people are to click your ad, and the quality of their experience once they reach your landing page"

This is all data that's generated based on the overall learning that Adwords does against your site presence. It's why it takes weeks to really get your data settled in, and why if you (or your Google rep) start to mismanage your account, things will rapidly go bad.

The GP story was based on the premise that opting a campaign into the display network increased CPC on search ad clicks. I know for a fact that it is not possible. I am not at liberty to go through each issue the GP had, so I linked to the best source of truth on this subject.

The effect of lowered account-wide CTR on CPC is something that has been experienced by a lot of people who have run Adwords campaigns. I saw it discussed a lot on forums about affiliate marketing. They always said, whatever you do, avoid the "account slap" that comes if your CTR plummets. I saw it myself on more than one account.

Maybe it isn't causal? But the correlation is pretty near 100%.

These are excellent tips. I have been managing Google Ads full time for about 12 years and I run a small agency. I can confirm he is right about all of this.

The challenging thing about this advice is that for most people it feels unnatural to do the opposite of what Google recommends. Usually people need to get ripped off a few times before they accept that fact that Google is no longer a good actor.

Google's reps routinely "take care" of big agency staff and show them a good time while feeding them the same "spend optimization" suggestions.

The agency staff can then claim the campaigns were optimized based on Google's suggestions, which is the perfect smokescreen.

Most big brands that outsource media buying don't have SMEs to audit the media buying they've outsourced, so the result is Google makes a ton of money via their preferred middleman, advertising agencies.

You are absolutely right. I worked at a big agency where I managed a team that ran the search ads for a fortune 500 tech company. That was usually how it worked. I tried to communicate up the chain that the dinners and outings on Google's dime are a clear conflict of interest, but nobody wanted to hear it.

By far the most dissapointing thing was that the client often just wanted to go with Google's recomendations or they had even worse ideas. Even when we really tried to look out for the best interests of the client it was like fighting an uphill battle both ways.

Another problem is that anything that isn't direct response is hard to measure so it's tough to make a clear and compelling case. Anybody can chalk up any hare brained idea to brand value and it is tough to push back on that when the client doesn't really care.

Like, everyone in the industry shows agency reps a good time. Back a decade ago, FB reps used to get the clients drunk the night before they'd see Google on the principle that they'd remember less.

However it's worth pointing out that Google as an org have absolutely hated ad agencies for many years, in fact being nice to the agencies was a strategy used by FB when I was there.

I'm not disputing your point about optimisations, but the notion that Google like ad agencies is just ludicrous.

I think the problem may be in the "performance compensation" built into their "experts" portfolio.

Google wants to make more money - of course they may not be giving you the best advice for your company :-)

What I have found works best is to always start playing around with the most restricted type of ads. So restrict by location, test, restrict to the most exact keyword or semi exact (instead of general), do not use common words as much as possible (or quote phrases instead of single words), etc etc.

Wow, thank you for these. And while at it, HN crowd , Any other tips/tricks/settings that would be beneficial for small business owner?

After I got burned with Google and Facebook, I had excellent results with Reddit.

You mean advertising on Reddit? What domain are you in?

> Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.

I really don't get this part. What's Google's interest in pointless clicks? Short term they could get some extra charge for those, but if they don't convert they lose a customer. On the other hand, for quality clicks they could just charge 5x the price and nobody would complain.

> What's Google's interest in pointless clicks? Short term they could get some extra charge for those

Because there are humans in the loop, and "Google" isn't a monolithic all-seeing entity. Sales guys, devs, etc. are rewarded on a quarterly (or yearly) basis, and short-term gains are prioritized over long-term effects ( I mean, how _do_ you measure the fact that, say, after getting 9 months of pointless clicks, the advertiser decided to cut their Adwords budget by 30%?)

So, someone runs an experiment (replace the obvious radio button with a hidden drop-down box, say), the clicks on the advertiser's ads go up, so the experiment increases revenue week-over-week by, say, 3%; and voila, everyone involved gets a pat on the back and a nice phat bonus come the next eval cycle, and maybe a promotion too.

> "I mean, how _do_ you measure the fact that, say, after getting 9 months of pointless clicks, the advertiser decided to cut their Adwords budget by 30%?"

Oh man, this is _the_ problem with metrics. We must find a way to measure and demonstrate aversion (instead of conversion).

> Short term they could get some extra charge for those, but if they don't convert they lose a customer.

They _might_ lose a customer — I suspect that they've determined that enough people either simply don't review their results closely or increase their spending to make it a net profit for them to do this. That would fit with the general pattern of hubris you see in many of their decisions where they've been coasting on their old reputation for at least a decade and don't seem to be fully aware of just how much loyalty they've sacrificed.

Plus they are a near monopoly/duopoly. So if the customer spends for wasted clicks they still get some good clicks as well. Google could optimize it for them better but the customer can not really tell if they could get a better result by some other means.

Money. Their interest is Money. They need to offload those garbage clicks that nobody wants to buy to customers who aren't experts at ad buying.

Let’s say with your optimised settings your ROI is 20%. With Google settings is 15%.

An end user might say 15% is pretty good and don’t touch it.

Google just earned 5% by giving you worst ROI.

If you start comparing with other ad providers you’l you might notice you’re being screwed. But low spenders rarely do proper checks.

this would explain why when i was doing an ad spend for my SAAS even though I limited it to the US all the users came from a different country as confirmed by a third party that tracked where users were from. This is brutal

I've seen this little "handy feature" bite every company I've ever consulted or worked with.

Gold advice. Thank you.

I think there is probably a record breaking class action lawsuit here with the right lawyers. Damages could be 50-100% of Google's yearly gross revenue, especially when you include countries outside on the US who really don't like Google.

Google intentionally modified both geo-targeting and mobile app targeting, removing the options advertisers set. For example, you opted out of mobile app targeted. Then they removed the option and you had to set it in the domain blacklist. Then they removed that. This wasn't a one off, hid, modified, and moved these options repeatedly.

Advertisers didn't know that when you geo-targeted a location, by default it was set to users searching that location. You didn't want people in India who were interested in NYC? Too bad.

Remember the whole Adwords prescription drug settlement. This is an organization run by people who would be serving hard time if they didn't have a legion of lawyers and bottomless pockets.

Perhaps, but I’m sure there’s a forced arbitration clause buried in a EULA somewhere…

The government in Sweden could call a too crappy EULA non-enforceable. It's like the anticompetitive clauses that I happily sign over here because they don't hold in court, which employers are well aware of.

Same exact thing happened to me when launching a product that was only available in the US.

For whatever reason, Google was showing my ads to people on the other side of the planet and then taking my money for the privilege.

That sounds like fraud. Why not take Google to court?

Because any challenge will lose. It is in their terms of service that what they are doing is legal. But nobody is going to read 70+ of legalese just to set up a campaign.

The issue is that they have not been good faith actors for many years now.

As explained by other comments above there is a hidden setting you need to change to get Google to actually run your ads in the areas you selected.

> Because any challenge will lose. It is in their terms of service that what they are doing is legal.

I don't think that's even close to a given, but consider how much time and money it would take to fight that lawsuit — they would be loathe to settle since it'd validate the idea for other customers, and you'd have to put in that effort hoping that they wouldn't succeed in being able to say it was a misunderstanding on your part or some nebulous “bug” which has reportedly been fixed. Most people don't lose anywhere near enough money this way for it to be worth fighting, especially since a lot of businesses would be worried about potentially being demoted on Google Maps, search, etc.

It doesn’t matter if it’s in the ToS if everything else misrepresents and misleads the user. Or regularly gets changed to undermine the user’s expectations. That’s bad faith, fraud, etc.

They may be “technically” abiding by their contract, but this is why judges are humans. Fraud is fraud.

Legislation and a companies terms of service are very different things.

> It is in their terms of service that what they are doing is legal

I don't know what you're trying to say, but that sentence is complete nonsense.

You can't make an illegal action legal by putting it in a contract.

There isn't any precedent that confusing UX is illegal, is there? If a user enables "interested in NYC" when they mean "browsing from NYC" is a judge going to get involved?

There absolutely is. Fraudulent misrepresentation and concealment.

If they are purposely making it difficult to understand and choose options then that can be a form of fraud.

Is there any precedent of someone proving fraudulent concealment based on a confusing UX?

I believe so, but I know various SaaS’s cancellation UX’s have been litigated.

It's not about logic or even law. Suing a giant like Google implies a base cost in legal fees that is simply not an option for most regular companies. They'll draw you out in procedure way before you can see a juge, let alone plead your case.

Global corporations are in a league of their own.

You can sign away certain rights or accept certain terms that would otherwise open avenues for a legal claim though, which is effectively what OP means I think.

Because I'm wary of litigation and unfortunately depend on Google for some of my business. I assume litigation would mean being removed from their platforms.

You funding the lawsuit?

I have had the opposite experience. I have tried many different ad networks for my product and the only two that work are Google and Bing, but Bing has very low volume. Facebook's bounce rate is about 80%. I get billed for so many accidental clicks.

Most other non-faang ad networks are hot garbage. So many bots. In my view, Google has a "monopoly" not because of anti-competitive behaviour... It's because they have the best ad product.

Not surprising at all. Just as a mobile user, on websites, I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally clicked on any ad. Every fricken time it’s by accident because some stupid pop up or overlay was in the way of closing a modal or ad box.

I do wonder, who are these people that intentionally click on ads?

AdNauseam users. Such a brilliant extension.

I just said 'fuck it' the other day, and started clicking on all ads that show up on my Facebook feed.

How many toolbars do you have installed now?

Competitors of the advertiser

Regular, non technology focused humans, mostly.

Do you know if you get charged for misclicks that are blocked by pihole? I have googletagservices blocked, so I think it should prevent google from using me as an excuse to defraud you.

Good question, I'm not sure. But very few of my targeted advertising base are going to have piholes configured, so that specifically is not impacting my numbers.

I can understand that people are going to have ad-blockers or just accidentally click ads, but it's scummy that FB charges me for it. They have the technical means to filter those out, but they don't.

That's ridiculous, isn't selecting a target market Marketing/Econ 101? What possible reason would they have for not giving some kind of locality options?

Google Knows Best™ and lack of real competition or regulation means they can do whatever they want.

Everyone wants US visitors so by including other countries it brings up the inventory of people looking/clicking ads which brings down the price per click which creates more ad spending

Marketing 101 would teach you to investigate your target market yourself, not simply select from a dropdown and assume that the automated real-time bidding platform will have taken that off your plate.

Maybe it's simply a bug, and nobody in Google is motivated to fix it.

I remember talking to some friends in Google and but estimated their error/fraud rate to be about 1/3 of ad revenue.

But they have no motivation to fix it and no one outside Google has the data to tell.

If the "fix" results in less profit, then sure no one will get promoted for this. So no motivation to fix.

I have seen this play out so many times over the years, “if we fix this bug, our revenue will go down X%” and no one will fix it. Ever. Any redesigns or redacts that fix this bug will probably fail A/B testing unless they account for this bug. It holds back the entire company from making real progress with the product, all for a few extra bucks.

It's funny it's like intentionally putting a feature that did this would make you guilty, but if it's just a bug then nobody can blame you for not fixing it.

Most software licenses say the software is sold "as is", so if there are bugs you can't complain.

It is not like having a monopoly on finding customers combined with not finding customers is going to have any economic effect.

It is also entirely fine if IT is leading the US economy where IT is a bunch of guys playing ping pong.

Companies can just dig a little deeper into their pockets, customers can pay a bit more for products. Specially nowadays everyone has plenty of money and the economy is solid as a rock.

It is the responsible thing to do.

I wonder if there is a way to play with the url submit string, you know, entering fields which don't have a UX selection. I use to do this with FB and Craigslist, leave the search criteria, and change the locale. In facebook, it was more the search string copy paste to groups(this was before marketplace). These hacks should come in handy if someone can hunt them down. Espeially the geo-tagging and the income-bracket (I am sure there is an income-bracket criteria in their big "benevolent" database... lol

There is an income bracket.... and almost every possible interest subsegement

look up google ad affinity groups

I think this is a bigger signal than anyone appreciates

If google is making it harder for people to spend money on ads, something is either seriously broken or alphabet figured out another way to make money that isn't ads

>restrict my advertising budget to just one city

This is not possible unless the end user are willing to provide geo tracking for your convenience. The IP of the phone is the one of a datacenter, and it can be in any state (speaking about the US) - heck, in some cases, there could be multiple outgoing IPs in different datacenterss, different states.

It's just a fallacy and wishful thinking... unless google combines the geo location data where the user has been logged with the browser one. Which, of course it is.

In this respect, I think cable companies are missing an apportunity, they should embrace and monetize geo-location. They are the only ones who can categorize us by income bracket (relatively speaking... house/neighborhood=income bracket). This has huge potential to become a targeted premium ad conduit.