I tried running some PPC ads once, for a month or so. I spent a lot of cash and got nowhere. Curiously I showed a healthy conversion rate on some ads, which encouraged me.
I spent an entire day tracking down a lot of these things. Turned out that in every single case, there was no sale, and I couldn't believe in a million years that traffic from these sites were really following my ads.
I stopped spending money with Google. A year later they sent me a voucher and begged me to try again. So I tweaked some settings, cut the list right down and spent their $150. Same results.
My overriding impression is that display ads, PPC ads and the like are an absolute cesspool of fraud and it's a waste of time trying to untangle the mess.
One of the first rules of Adwords is to disable showing ads across the display network (this is enabled by default). You should only be showing ads on the search network (and only google.com at that, not the search partners).
Setup correctly, these types of scams aren't much of a problem with Adwords. FWIW, I've found Adwords to be very very effective, provided you know exactly what you're doing, and know how to adjust your campaign settings such that Google doesn't bleed unnecessary money from you.
Yes, I know that and I had always just used search ads. But I was dominating the SERPs for the terms I was interested in, so tried the display network as an experiment as an alternative to see how it would go.
>I've found Adwords to be very very effective, provided you know exactly what you're doing, and know how to adjust your campaign settings such that Google doesn't bleed unnecessary money from you.
I agree with you there, but you need to learn the ropes when someone else is paying the bills for your mistakes. A wrong setting has the ability to eat your spend very quickly. My point is that the display network is a cesspool of fraud, and I doubt I would touch it again.
The conversion rate that you get in Adwords. This is supposedly created by having code on your order completion page. But Adwords was showing conversions (implying sales) for sales that never existed. So either scammers were spoofing the conversions or the code was faulty. But the conversion optimization works by increasing the ads that convert. All good as long as the conversions actually are real.
I spent an entire day tracking down a lot of these things. Turned out that in every single case, there was no sale, and I couldn't believe in a million years that traffic from these sites were really following my ads.
I stopped spending money with Google. A year later they sent me a voucher and begged me to try again. So I tweaked some settings, cut the list right down and spent their $150. Same results.
My overriding impression is that display ads, PPC ads and the like are an absolute cesspool of fraud and it's a waste of time trying to untangle the mess.