Advertisers wasting money on Google Ads through errors

Forum Moderators: buckworks & skibum

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Advertisers wasting money on Google Ads through errors

engine

8:13 pm on Feb 24, 2019 (gmt 0)

I very rarely click on ads, but when I do, I'm in the market for the product, or service.
I just clicked on a Google Product ad that ive been seeing for a few days now, and it's consistently offered a better price. I thought I'd investigate and possibly order.
Once I clicked through the product page was in a foreign language, and, wait for it, the product was out of stock, which, interestingly, was described in English.

Google wins, advertiser loses, prospective customer continues the search.

buckworks

10:13 am on Feb 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

I don't think Google wins as much as one might assume when advertisers have errors in their set-up like that.

In the short term Google wins the cost of the click but in the longer term they'll lose the advertiser.

I've often said that to improve the ROI from a PPC spend, be more selective about who sees your ads. Appropriate language targeting would be a kindergarten basic.

Savvy advertisers will remove out-of-stock items from their shopping ad feeds until the stock is replenished. In fact, it will often make sense to remove a product from the feed before it's actually out of stock, to reduce the situation where you sell the last item but its ads are still running for the rest of the day.

engine

4:02 pm on Feb 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Interestingly, i'm now looking on desktop and that ad is still there. I can now see it's a third party running the ad, which i couldn't see on the mobile. It's a UK company advertising with the page in Danish.

tangor

6:20 pm on Feb 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Obviously the automated side of the ad biz is just too quick for the human side. Somebody dropped the ball and failed to let the machines know.