On Tuesday, February 19, 2013 3:49:01 PM UTC-8, Tim in Boulder wrote: > > On 2/18/2013 1:59 PM, Nathan wrote: > > ... When I last tried the display network, it > > somehow thought Angry Birds was related to my target keywords, and I > > suddenly spent 100s of dollars per day on useless clicks. I put a > > stop to that pretty fast. Doesn't say much about a company (Google) > > whose bread and butter is targeted ads. > Well, for better or worse their developers are all about optimizing ads > for users who will CLICK on them, not users who will actually want your > product. It's the only data they can optimize for. >
NO, it is not. They should also be honoring the terms under which those clicks were purchased I did NOT pay for "as many clicks as possible", and I don't advise most people to do that. I paid for specific keywords. If you set an ad to run on Android 2.2+ and in the United States and found that you were getting clicks from China on iPhone, you'd be pretty perturbed, right? They did not fulfill this promise. "That is, your ads will be matched to mobile apps and mobile sites on the Display Network using the same contextual targeting guidelines that are used to show your ads on computers, based on the keywords you choose for your campaigns. " No reasonable person would have associated the narrow set of keywords I chose with Angry Birds. No reasonable algorithm should have. Bottom line: I couldn't trust Google to choose the apps in which my ad was run. Their placement for ads in search results is spot on, but not so good for choosing apps based on keywords. That's what those developers could be working to improve. Maybe they have been working on that since the colossal failure I witnessed two years ago. But moving forward to today. They have more options now: http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722057?hl=en You can now pick apps to place your ads in by package name or category. You still have the option of letting Google pick the apps for you - but given their track record, I don't prefer that. Since I promised I would spend more time on advertising if it had better targeting, I will try out the mobile ads campaign option. And report back here if people are interested. > That is, unless you're using Google Analytics as well. Then they COULD > potentially optimize for users who complete an action. I've seen some ad > copy that implies you can use Google Analytics that way, but I'm not sure > it will do it in an automated way. Haven't tried. > I do use Google Analytics and it is exactly how I know which terms are paying off, ie person actually installs and eventually buys the paid version. I have brought the data from Adwords into analytics. I have not had luck getting the conversion data from Analytics to feed back into Adwords. At any rate, allowing Adwords to optimize your CPA (cost per action) in an automated way requires you having a track record of more conversions than I am likely to have soon. Nonetheless, I have sufficient data to *manually* optimize the campaigns for conversion, and it is really quite easy. If a keyword isn't giving you more money that you put into it, simply delete it. Repeat periodically. Nathan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
