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Comment by gas9S9zw3P9c | Hacker News Reader

I've tried AdWords for a couple of projects and have had very similar experiences. It has always been a total waste of money for me and I'm having a hard time believing that it's actual people, i.e. potential customers clicking on these things. The behavior of the people coming from AdWords is always completely different from those coming through other sources, as if they just clicked on it by accident or as if they're just bots.

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thats entirely dependant on the volume, when you expend 6 million, you problably are going to loose a lot of money to bots, but you are going to recup the looses from other clients. When you expend very little money, the bots can easily get all the budget.

Maybe I don't understand how ads work, but this sounds like "lose money on each sale but we make it up with volume"...

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.

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