On Friday, February 22, 2013 7:52:10 AM UTC-8, Tim in Boulder wrote: > > > Sure. They definitely should honor your keyword filtering. But, if an > advertiser (say Rovio/Angry Birds) decided to put in TONS of keywords (some > being completely irrelevant) hoping to get as many different categories of > ads as possible, then it wouldn't be Google's fault, except as much as they > weren't monitoring their AdWords user settings to ensure their advertiser > were being honest. > > Not making any claims about whether this is true, but I would be surprised > if a keyword-filtered ad went to a completely unrelated app. > Well, it happened and I was surprised. There were no such words in the app description or visible in the app, but I didn't search the string files in the APK.
Another possibility is that EVERYONE plays Angry Birds, and that some of > the PEOPLE playing Angry Birds matched your keywords (potentially because > of other apps they had installed, or what Google otherwise knows of their > search history, or whatever). > It's not impossible, but the pattern didn't match. Adwords isn't advertising that kind of targeting and they were supposedly offering "contextual" targeting for the campaign in question. The sheer volume suggested that every Angry Birds player in the US would have seen those ads had I let it go on or had a higher budget. More likely, the algorithm simply found that app in whatever way, and thought that the high click rate was a sign that people were interested. Or maybe other advertisers with similar keywords were having good luck. Since there is no transparency in Google's algorithm for choosing app placements, we can only speculate. It matters little if we can argue whether it was Google's *fault*, because it is Google's *problem* They lost business because of it. In the end, whether it was because the algorithm can be abused by app publishers, or they stretched the meaning of "contextual relevance" beyond what I found acceptable, or had other criteria that they thought I would find useful, it doesn't matter. I, the customer, was not satisfied with their automatic placements. More importantly, the traffic didn't convert any better than what Tim got from AdMob. The only choice at the time was to trust Google or not to trust Google. I don't think their automatic placement is much better now. I say that because using "Search for placement ideas" inside Adwords comes up with the most ridiculously unrelated apps you can imagine (at least for me). But I can micromanage it now and pick my own placements, which is what I want anyway. At the very least, I should get a few clicks from my direct competitors before they notice and block me. No guarantee that my hand picked placements will convert any better, but it is worth a try. But maybe Angry Birds is set up so that users accidentally click banners > (supposedly this can get you kicked out of AdWords/AdMob, but I don't know > how well that's enforced), which is why you got so many clicks with no > corresponding action. > I do think that accidental clicks are significant in mobile ads, whether the app developers are deliberate about it or not. A small, high res capacitive touch screen is just much more prone to error than a mouse and display. But even purposeful clicks from non target users are of little value. You can't afford to attract too many curious freeloaders through paid advertising. You need buyers. 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.
