Hey google Ads, is this a lie or are you simply delusional?

We take the quality of our ad traffic very seriously, and you can be assured that our proprietary technology aims to remove clicks and impressions from unethical users and automated sources before they ever reach your account. In addition to our automated click protection techniques, we have a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When our system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important data about the source of the potentially invalid clicks. One of the goals of our team is to make invalid activity very difficult and unrewarding for unethical users, thereby decreasing their chance of success.

You can not be serious!? (thank you Johnny Mac)

Worst of it is that nothing can be done. Turn off the advertising, they don't care. Complain, automated responses that cost them no resources. Don't pay the bill, off to collections. Guess we'll have to see what court looks like.

google definitely appears to be in supernova mode right now, consuming everything in scorched galaxy fury.

The situation is clear, as it has been for a long time with Google Search.

A single webmaster or advertiser is of no importance to Google.

The only way an individual could exert any influence could be as part of a union, a guild or an association where many webmasters support action.

IMO that could be the only way Google could listen.

But are webmasters mature enough to join such a union and pay the membership?

Join, pay, and stay unified. Uphill battle for sure.

And then the details... what is a webmaster?

Likely have to be an association of website owners.

Funny that google completely destroys the SERPs to try and generate more revenue but then also fleeces the advertisers with garbage. This can not be a sustainable trajectory?

I am still fed up that the search terms report only shows a fraction of the clicks Google is charging me for.

Search Keywords shows them all, but that isn't what users typed into G search which is what I am interested in.

So far no one at Google has given me an adequate explanation.

I think their fraud is becoming increasingly clear.

We are now two months into our complaint with google regarding apparent fraudulent clicks. Despite their repeated assurances of providing an answer within 3-5 business days, we are yet to receive a satisfactory response.

Initially, I suspected a third-party entity might be responsible for these fraudulent clicks. However, google's subsequent conduct has raised concerns that they might be the culpable party, possibly engaging in deceptive practices.

In response, we have paused our advertising campaigns and are withholding payment for the pending invoice. We expect to receive clear answers from google, either voluntarily or through legal discovery should they pursue debt collection.

Long time lover and user of AdWords and GA3 - long time hater of the new Google Advertising - and GA4.

Yes the "reps" are marketing people in disguise. They do not know what they are selling - they are reading scripts. Be wary.

There is no such thing as "technical support"

There is no evident action to remove or "date"
useless tech support articles - so to figure anything out, you have to be exceptionally clever. This seems extremely irresponsible. Why don't they just make all the content related to deprecated products and features on RED pages or something.

They will NOT refund money (to me) for bad Performance Max clicks (non targeted overseas clicks and zero time on site clicks)

They still claim this horrible product will respond to targeting and that they will refund "garbage" clicks - they do not.

At a larger level, they have gutted the AdWords environment by hiding search terms, obscuring useful control through "automated" features that one often doesn't even know about.

Insider friends tell me this is "SOP" and will not change.

Yes, it is a miserable situation. Yes there have been attempts to organize - yes there have been swat-downs to try to do this via various discussion forums. They have gone no where. I was part of the founding of one maybe 20 years ago. What happened? The usual. Too much work to maintain a real membership. Not something anyone wants to administer unless there's gobs of money. Not so with associations like this.

This may change. Hope to see it here first!

Hi chewey, interesting that there have been attempts to organise. Sad that they didn't work out.

Last I knew, there was a SEMNE but mostly about networking. I'm sure there are others in other locations,but as much as I think these groups should be lobbying, no one seemed to have had the stomach for it. Maybe all these awful changes might provoke some action.

It is enraging, and I am (rarely) happy to NOT have any clients in this market at this time.

Those that I keep in touch with are either FED UP - or entirely enraptured by the Google Marketing Clods.

I was happy when I lost on this last proposal. Surprisingly happier and happier as time goes on.

My current irritation is that it seems I can only set responsive ads. But they don't produce the ads that I want because they cycle all the time. I always want my ad to start with the same word, but for that word to appear only once in the ad. This isn't possible with responsive ads!

Just noticing how bad google Analytics is lying about Bing CPC visitor stats. There is simply no bottom to the depths of google's shenanigans...

This is all so unbelievably short sighted, they must KNOW they don't have much runway left. I'm not saying their end is near but they sure are acting like they know it is.

@Shepherd, how far out were GA's stats on Bing CPC visitors for you?

I haven't done the analysis but perhaps I should.

Checking my stats for the last 30 days, Bing is very slightly over reported in GA and GAds is very slightly under reported. Both figures from their ad interfaces are quite close to what GA is reporting though.

Sorry, I should have been specific. The visitor counts are reasonably accurate, where the shenanigans come in is the interaction stats.

Over the last few weeks google Analytics has been reporting that Bing CPC visitors "Average engagement time per session" is 25s, before that we have a very long history of Bing CPC visitors Average engagement time per session being 2m+, inline with all other visitors.

I'm sure it's just a glitch and it's simply a coincidence that it only makes BIng CPC traffic look bad...

Oh, OK. Our engagement times per session is 55 Sec for Bing Organic. 33 Sec for CPC. Always been about like that for them and us.

PMax automates bidding and targeting, which can lead to higher spending if not monitored closely. You might be seeing clicks that aren't converting or even appearing in Google Analytics.

I can only repeat what I said many years ago. Google is an animal with no head nor tail. Besides the possibility of fraudulent activities, it's concept has became a fraud by itself.
Take an example of display ads. I advertise for the internet and TV services, and my ads start appearing on 100s or 1,000s of websites. I use the placement report and one of those is some gaming website for sort of toddlers or whatever kids up to 8-ish years old. The site has crazy traffic. When I went to visit it to just to check what that thing was, I got a huuuuge banner all over the site (AdSense pop-up ad) and all the games were under it. What else all these kids will do to close the ad? Click on it!
This is pure fraud.
And I am sure more examples can be found, even in search if you start examining broad and phrase matches.

To protect itself, Google offered tools like exclusions and negative keywords, nice, but not enough, especially for display ads.

BTW, recently I got emails about some court thing going on (Rene Cabrera v. Google LLC). This is something about location targeting. In every single aspect of this type of advertising you can find how they make billions by taking pennies/dollars from all of us.

I understand why you're so wary of Google Ads. It can be really inefficient. Especially for certain industries. But I still think the most important thing here is the structure.

Do no evil = fake everything

Hi smallcompany, I also followed my ads onto the Google display network and was not impressed by the websites I found there. I won't let them display off Google properties at all any more.

I won't let them display off Google properties at all any more.

google Ads is a constant game of Whack-a-Mole (we don't play anymore), all day long google implements new ways to to steal money from advertisers. If google put as much effort into working with advertisers/businesses so everyone did well (like the old days) as they do trying to swindle every last drop of blood out of businesses the world would be a better place.

As mentioned in this video ( [youtube.com...] ) google has got to the point of screwing over everyone, searchers and advertisers...