I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.

I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.

Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.

Who benefits from the fraud, though?

Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.

Without the fraud prevention, it would be 99.9998%. Pushing it to 17% is impressive, even if not sufficient

Google is an overwhelming market leader vertically and horizontally. Not only do they not have to compete with their competition. They don't have to compete for their competition's business partners. They don't have to compete at all.

What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.

They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.

> What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.

Who is their true customer then?

Do not attribute malice (or even intention) to which can be explained by Google-level incompetence.

The moment Google removed 'Do No Evil' from their values the only explanation left is pure malice.

When you want to keep your house warm, you ordinarily should not burn the rafters. However, when the house is about to collapse anyway, it is cheaper to dismantle the roof and to burn the rafters than to buy firewood.

This; search is dead google is a walking corpse.

Hypothetically you would have already paid for the ads before your account gets suspended/banned then hypothetically Google just keep sending you automated replies denying your requests for support until you give up or lawyer up. And when you consider the shear scale Google's adtech networks run at, this would add up fast and generate revenue over costs. Hypothetically

They also pull this off in the other direction too. You having earned money by showing ads? They claim there was click-farming ...and it's gone!

I really don't get it. Ads are supposed to be Google's biggest revenue thing but the entire process is just so infuriating at times. Their ads dashboard/tool for running ads is one of the worst pieces of software i have used period. My theory is they just dont care about individual experience as long as businesses see value in it. Nobody is going to not run ads because the platform is from hell. They still need to run ads and thus suffering is okay.

I know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season.

Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.

It's just how the whole company operates at this point.

But in large, it works. We only hear from people for whom it doesn’t work.

I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate.

So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."

For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads.

Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.

Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else.

ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard

Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.

Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?

They are working meaning people keep buying them. This has nothing to do with ROAS. This developer gave Google $220 of revenue.

$220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense.

Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.

That seems in the interest of the savvy media teams, but surely Google would be better off having a market that encourages all healthy competition?

Would the casinos benefit from a careful presentation of the mathematical odds of all the games and how to best position your wagers ?

Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?

The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long

In fairness to Google, it’s not like they didn’t warn us. The service is called “Ad Mob”, after all.

“Nice app you got there. It would be a shame if your account got banned.”