I don’t recommend that any small businesses should even consider suing Google, and I’m not a legal expert of any kind. But these are potential issues that could lead to class actions if they got enough publicity…
Location Settings
When you make ads in Google Ads, you choose a location where you want your ads to run. Most businesses only advertise where they service or sell to. Yet the default setting, buried away in advanced options, is to show ads to people in your location, or people who are “interested” in your location.
The main support article, Target ads to geographic locations, doesn’t mention this setting, although it does say:
When it comes to advertising on Google Ads, consider the property adage: “Location, location, location!” Regardless of how good your ad is, it probably won’t perform as well if it doesn’t appear in the right places. Reach your customers where they are and where your business can serve them by using Google Ads location targeting.
Typically this default setting results in wasting 2–5% of your budget. Not a big deal, but a massive amount of extra revenue for Google. The worst I’ve seen was for a local plumber where 90% of their ad spend was coming from India. And they had no idea.
The default location reporting shows results from where you have targeted. Most users wouldn’t dig deeper to see where the ad clicks are actually coming from, which is two clicks away.
Click Fraud
While it can be a big problem in Display campaigns (because site owners are rewarded if they click on ads on their own site), it also affects Search campaigns occasionally — when a malicious competitor clicks on your ad just to cost you. Very tempting when a single click can cost $100.
Google has automated systems in place to combat this. How effective they are is anybody’s guess, as Google doesn’t share their methods. The only action you can take on your own is to add suspicious IP addresses to ad campaigns and have them excluded — ads won’t show to those IP addresses.
- Google doesn’t help you discover the IP addresses, you’ll need to hire a 3rd party
- You are limited to 500 IP addresses, which can be a problem for larger advertisers
- You have to manually add them to each campaign — it can’t be done at account level. This alone seems to be a deliberate attempt to dissuade people from adding them
And there’s something else that I don’t think Google has ever admitted publicly. Sophisticated click fraud defeats the blocking of IP addresses, by getting to the ad using a clean IP address, then switching IP addresses before clicking on it, using a blocked IP address.
Display Ads on Mobile Apps
Every marketer that I have met knows that ads on mobile apps convert poorly compared to ads appearing on proper websites. Most app users would tell you they rarely click on an ad and interrupt what they are doing, and if they do so it might be by accident — fat fingers.
Google used to have an obscure off switch for apps. You excluded adsenseformobileapps.com as a placement. Now they have “simplified” things:
Targeting and exclusion controls for mobile Display have been simplified to make it easier to reach the growing base of mobile users.
The following targeting settings have been replaced by simplified device targeting options of computer, tablet, and mobile:
adsenseformobileapps.com placement targeting and exclusion
Now you have to individually select well over 100 app categories to exclude them one by one. Not being able to turn off all apps at once can only benefit Google.
Broad Keywords
Regardless of whether you are using the web interface, or Google Ads Editor (which professionals use), when you enter a keyword the default matching option is broad. Broad match covers so many synonyms and variations that they are rarely used by professionals — they lead to too much wasted ad spend by showing ads for irrelevant search queries. And yet is persists as a default.
Negative Keywords
You can combat irrelevant searches by adding negative keywords. While Google has no problem serving your ads for any misspelling of your keywords (because they know what the searcher really meant), negatives only work if they precisely match. A negative for “london” won’t stop your ad showing for “londn”.
For search campaigns, you can use broad, exact or phrase match negative keywords. However, these negative match types work differently than their positive counterparts. The main difference is that you’ll need to add synonyms, singular or plural versions, misspellings and other close variations if you want to exclude them.
Adding a negative of every way you can misspell a word is impossible. There is no technical limitation to Google providing better functionality. But that would cost them revenue.
Additionally, negatives do not work on any search query with more than 10 words in them. This is a problem for some accounts that get clicks from students who enter their whole study question into Google — you cannot stop them.
Summary
Google must be aware of these problems, and presumably does not fix them because it will cost them revenue, and prompt questions around why wasn’t this fixed sooner?.
The only debatable issue is broad keywords, because in many instances they work well and they are easier for novice advertisers to understand. The rest, in my opinion, are beyond debate.
