Re:I Spent $6M on Google Ads Last Year
by ghufran_syed on Monday April 27, 2020 @08:43PM
(#23002031)
Maybe I don't understand how ads work, but this sounds like "lose money on each sale but we make it up with volume"...
[ Parent
| on HN ]
more like lose money on most but make up for it later. bots are just an unfortunate fact you have to amortize into your costs.
Let's say you see 75% bot traffic. You make $10 per actual user. If youre spending $2 per action with 4 actions, you burn $6(75%) on bots, $2(25%) on a real user($8 total), and get $10 - netting $2. So you're making money, but wasting more.
So, let's say you set your targeting to completely exclude the bots. Great, you spent $2 and made $10, netting $8. The problem though is you ruled out 90% of your traffic - you have false positives on whether its a bot so you exclude legit users(all of this targeting is fuzzy rule based). You can 10x the traffic with bots, making $20, but you cant 10x the perfect targeting, so youre stuck with $8.