A few years ago, I tried to help out a locally owned gym do an experiment with Google Ad-Words. The place small storefront in a run-down strip mall straight out of the 1960s, but it had very good equipment for people that were in the know and it was 24 hours.
The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding people to put equipment away in Word. I got the sense the business was not going well after a protracted battle with a former business partner, where the business partner just wanted to liquidate the assets and call it a day. He managed to buy the business partner out and continued to operate the place---sans a few treadmills. I decided to try and help him out by volunteering my time and some money to see if a small, targeted ad buy from Google could help him out. It sure beat finding another place like this.
The dashboard made it look very targeted geographically. But, when I investigated where they were all coming from it was 95% international and from affiliates listings from very low quality sites with no information on them. A month and $300 later, I discontinued this experiment because the traffic was entirely bot driven.
From that experience, I've come to the conclusion that online Ad Tech is 99% a scam.
Everyone who thinks this way already blocks all ads.
In this case, it was the slightly less worse case where the ad was meant to be informative instead of manufacture consumption. If you were looking for a gym that met this criteria in this locality, finding information about this particular gym would have been limited to people willing to go through several pages of search results, or looking through specialized indexes, or just happen to be walking past the storefront on the way to the bar or gun shop next door.
This was the exact use case that online advertisers invent to justify that they're not all bad, and they failed to come through.
The owner was a nice guy but he relied entirely on word-of-mouth and his technical skills extended to making expletive laced, 128-point-font signs reminding people to put equipment away in Word. I got the sense the business was not going well after a protracted battle with a former business partner, where the business partner just wanted to liquidate the assets and call it a day. He managed to buy the business partner out and continued to operate the place---sans a few treadmills. I decided to try and help him out by volunteering my time and some money to see if a small, targeted ad buy from Google could help him out. It sure beat finding another place like this.
The dashboard made it look very targeted geographically. But, when I investigated where they were all coming from it was 95% international and from affiliates listings from very low quality sites with no information on them. A month and $300 later, I discontinued this experiment because the traffic was entirely bot driven.
From that experience, I've come to the conclusion that online Ad Tech is 99% a scam.