I'm guessing most of it. Was giving them $5k / month, turned it off... zero effect. Other than no more traffic from Romanian blogs that were always 404.
Out of our top 10 traffic sources, at least half were fraud from our Google spend. The other half was legit Google searches.
I disagree. I manage a few small (<$10k/month campaigns) and Google is constantly advising bad moves. They recommend networks I’ve repeatedly turned off. They recommend geographic regions where I don’t operate. They recommend keyword combinations that have nothing to do with my site.
The default recommendations from AdWords are always bad for me and always very much more expensive. If I just accepted their recommendations and then their recommendations to up ad spend, I would easily pay 10x.
Maybe google is good for everyone but me. But maybe google just makes recommendations in their interest instead of mine.
Even with close attention, I find that I have to walk the line to not screw up because Google is trying to trick me. I feel similarly about Facebook’s changing privacy stuff. Like it’s me against the firm.
I've never had a consultation with one of Google's reps where the suggestion didn't increase my spend, while giving a worse ROI. At this point, I don't believe it's incompetence, it's systematic malice.
But I wasn't talking about using any of Google's suggestions, by phone or their automated recommendations. I was just referring to simple a/b testing and systematic use of negative keywords and fine-tuning settings.
11pm-5am is universally disabled for all my campaigns for example. My customer base simply isn't awake and buying at these times, because they have jobs. This alone dropped ad spend by 25% while only reducing conversions by 5%.
Not to mention that they repeatingly shows ads that I have taken the time to click "Not interested" on, to which they have answered "We'll try not to show you this ad again."
They either lie or they have just failed badly so far.
So some poor smuck - or rather a wealthy owner of a number of scammy sites - is getting fleeced, month by month, as AdWords keeps insisting on insulting me by suggesting my current family isn't good enough.
Hah! I get way more traffic and conversions by advertising about $150/month through Craigslist. I tried spending that much a day with AdWords, with all the targeting and settings fine tuned to my market, but never reached the quality traffic I get through the classified advertising.
There’s a difference between a campaign with bad quality scores or bad conversion rates with a campaign that basically fails to attract any humans at all while still spending a great deal of money.
The former requires a huge amount of knowledge and talent which is highly valuable. The latter should be able to be taken for granted, but in actuality is the most important thing to guard against.
And our competitors imitated us, and poured even more into it because they didn't have our Google rank and likely didn't understand how to look for bad "traffic". So in a tiny niche of e-commerce Google was taking in at least $30/k a month, probably much more.
Out of our top 10 traffic sources, at least half were fraud from our Google spend. The other half was legit Google searches.