steve_69

Clearest case of small man's syndrome you're ever likely to see.

The danger with this is that these knobheads are trying to use us to become relevant again. We're best off ignoring them and leaving them out in the wilderness. No one in their right mind listens to a word they say anyway

Yes, Retailers are predominantly interested in returns for sure. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS = Revenue generated/Ad spend) is the normal metric they're interested in. But let's keep it simpler with Cost Per Acquisition (CPA = Cost/Sales). I gave you an example where costs were reduced and sales not increased. That's still an improvement in average CPA. They'd be happy with that. Totally agree that I'm making assumptions. As we both are. But I would take you up on your wager. Spend limits are a naive way to control spend. Bid and CPC is a much better way. If you're capping out and losing impression share to Budget, you're leaving money on the table. You could have got the same spend away with more clicks at a lower CPC, or you've missed out on potentially profitable clicks that could have been had later in the day. The truth is though, that neither of us know for sure. Unless one of happens to work on their account?! So at absolute best, all we can say is that clicking on their ads fraudulently might make their account less efficient, and it might make it more efficient. At the moment we're sitting on the two opposite sides of the fence, based on our own vast experience. And I'd hazard you're an expert in the field. I'd consider myself one too. If we're not in agreement, then it's because it's impossible to say what the definite outcome will be. In which case I think the best course of action would be to agree it's uncertain and not do it. As an aside, I'm not trying to create confrontation or cause problems. This is just my informed opinion on the topic and I'm not trying to belittle the views of others. Maybe we even know each other IRL, PPC is an incredibly small and incestuous world afterall! Fair enough, let's call it 1-1. 69? Your place or mine?

Yes, Retailers are predominantly interested in returns for sure. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS = Revenue generated/Ad spend) is the normal metric they're interested in. But let's keep it simpler with Cost Per Acquisition (CPA = Cost/Sales). I gave you an example where costs were reduced and sales not increased. That's still an improvement in average CPA. They'd be happy with that. Totally agree that I'm making assumptions. As we both are. But I would take you up on your wager. Spend limits are a naive way to control spend. Bid and CPC is a much better way. If you're capping out and losing impression share to Budget, you're leaving money on the table. You could have got the same spend away with more clicks at a lower CPC, or you've missed out on potentially profitable clicks that could have been had later in the day. The truth is though, that neither of us know for sure. Unless one of happens to work on their account?! So at absolute best, all we can say is that clicking on their ads fraudulently might make their account less efficient, and it might make it more efficient. At the moment we're sitting on the two opposite sides of the fence, based on our own vast experience. And I'd hazard you're an expert in the field. I'd consider myself one too. If we're not in agreement, then it's because it's impossible to say what the definite outcome will be. In which case I think the best course of action would be to agree it's uncertain and not do it. As an aside, I'm not trying to create confrontation or cause problems. This is just my informed opinion on the topic and I'm not trying to belittle the views of others. Maybe we even know each other IRL, PPC is an incredibly small and incestuous world afterall! Fair enough, let's call it 1-1. 69?

This bit definitely isn't true. Quality score is one secondary factor in the PPC auction. The primary factor is your bid amount. Even if we positively impacted the quality score (which we won't) their ads might gain one position. They don't automatically jump to position 1 because a few people clicked on them. Google also monitors things like bounce-back - people who click on an ad and then bounce straight back to the search results, which tells Google the ad isn't relevant. That's essentially what we're doing. If we inadvertently I don't want to get into an argument about this. But... Quality Score and Ad Quality are not just secondary factors in the auction. They are a key component of Ad Rank and Actual Cost Per Click. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6297?hl=en-GB If an ad starts to get consistently higher CTR, then it will be deemed higher quality and more relevant. This could result in a position boost and reduction in CPC premium. I never suggested it would rocket them into position 1 on the page, but I would argue any increase, no matter how small, is counter to the motivation for doing this in the first place. Also Bounce Rate is not a factor in Ad Quality. Google took a stance on this as its a misleading metric. If someone goes to a website and immediately finds what they are looking for and leaves, that's a bounce - and its not an indicator of poor user experience or irrelevance. Some (non-Google) people suggest that it factors into Landing Page Experience, but there is no evidence to suggest this is true, and no documentation from Google Ads suggesting it to be the case. CTR is however a major factor in calculating Quality Score and Ad Quality, as stated in some of the Google Ads articles I shared earlier. I wholeheartedly and genuinely think this will be a futile exercise. Anyway, Paid Search debates aren't everyone's cup of tea, so maybe we start another thread in Chat or PM me? So let's say the avg. cost per click for SD is £0.50 and by improving their ad quality (which won't happen) we take their avg. cost per click down to £0.40. We're still going to be costing Sd 40p every time we click on the ads and the idea is to use up their daily budget so the ads won't show, so it makes no difference anyway. I work with pay per click on a daily basis and believe me, ad quality and quality don't have that big an impact on ad position. Google is a business, they want money so your bid amount is by far the biggest factor they look at OK. Last thing from me. If we use your example and flesh it out a bit more. Let's hypothetically say we're talking about the keyword "rugby ball". Let's say in a typical week 2000 people click on the SD ad for "rugby ball". And it originally costs £0.50. That's a weekly cost of 2000*0.50 = £1000 on that keyword. Let's now say we manage to artificially inflate those 2000 clicks to say 2100 people clicking fraudulently, increasing CTR and reducing CPC down to £0.40. Then their weekly cost becomes 2100*0.40 = £840. So even though those 100 additional clicks don't lead to any additional sales, you've made their activity more efficient. That's a hypothetical situation, I understand that. But it's totally plausible in the Google Ads set up, and its something I've seen a lot (but with legitimate reasons for increased clicks). Google are indeed a business, but they want Advertiser's money - and they will only continue to get that as long as Google Ads provides value for them, they are not interested in inflating costs for short term gains. I too work on Paid Search for a living. Maybe PM me and we can have a chat about it. I might even be able to save you some money! Ha! If none of us here have been clicking on their ads and now we are, we are costing them £1000 that (if your calculations are correct) could drop to £840, but firstly that's probably money they weren't spending before and secondly by using up the budget with no intention to buy anything we are stopping them from generating revenue through their paid ads for the whole day (assuming we can use up their daily budget). That's the only equation you need to know. You're massively overcomplicating something that is very simple. I'm really not over complicating things. You're making some big assumptions: 1) That they have a Campaign Daily Budget or Shared Daily Budget cap which your going to be able to force them to hit prematurely. That's a massive assumption, as most large advertisers don't cap their activity in this way. 2) That they aren't getting substantial click traffic through Paid Search already. SportDirect.com, like it or not, are a massive business and will be getting huge amounts of traffic through Paid Search. The whole Google Ads set up is built to avoid exactly what you're trying to do here. If it worked the way you want it to, then any business who wanted to detrimentally impact their competitors could use this as a tactic. They can't, and they don't. If you really want to increase costs for SportsDirect.com and improve Google's revenue, then you could just create a Google Ads account for SportsRedirect.com and bid on the term "sports direct". It would cost you money, but it would be more felt. But then we're stepping into the realms of madness. I strongly suggest you find another way of protesting. You work in PPC, right. When you're reporting to your clients what are the main metrics the client is interested in? Conversions, cost per conversion and conversion rate for the most part, particularly when it's an ecommerce site. If reports are showing a slight reduction in cpc. but a big drop in conversions, big jump in avg. CPA and reduction in conversion rate that's something that will be noticed. Yes, i'm making assumptions, as are you. The whole point here is disruption and this will disrupt. I would wager my house on Sports Direct not having an uncapped daily budget. I've worked with some huge companies and they all had a daily spend limits, and when I say big i'm talking about huge high street retailers that dominate their sectors. The only way that would be happening is if their cost per conversion is so low that they've just said to their PPC Manager 'get as many sales as you can at that CPA or under.'. So if we drive up the CPA what happens? Disruption and investigation into why their CPA is going up. Add to that the fact that SD have a strong organic presence and most people naturally gravitate to the organic listings, and they have huge brand recognition (sadly) so rather than type in 'shit Donnay socks' they'll either go direct to the SD website or google 'Sports Direct'.

This bit definitely isn't true. Quality score is one secondary factor in the PPC auction. The primary factor is your bid amount. Even if we positively impacted the quality score (which we won't) their ads might gain one position. They don't automatically jump to position 1 because a few people clicked on them. Google also monitors things like bounce-back - people who click on an ad and then bounce straight back to the search results, which tells Google the ad isn't relevant. That's essentially what we're doing. If we inadvertently I don't want to get into an argument about this. But... Quality Score and Ad Quality are not just secondary factors in the auction. They are a key component of Ad Rank and Actual Cost Per Click. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6297?hl=en-GB If an ad starts to get consistently higher CTR, then it will be deemed higher quality and more relevant. This could result in a position boost and reduction in CPC premium. I never suggested it would rocket them into position 1 on the page, but I would argue any increase, no matter how small, is counter to the motivation for doing this in the first place. Also Bounce Rate is not a factor in Ad Quality. Google took a stance on this as its a misleading metric. If someone goes to a website and immediately finds what they are looking for and leaves, that's a bounce - and its not an indicator of poor user experience or irrelevance. Some (non-Google) people suggest that it factors into Landing Page Experience, but there is no evidence to suggest this is true, and no documentation from Google Ads suggesting it to be the case. CTR is however a major factor in calculating Quality Score and Ad Quality, as stated in some of the Google Ads articles I shared earlier. I wholeheartedly and genuinely think this will be a futile exercise. Anyway, Paid Search debates aren't everyone's cup of tea, so maybe we start another thread in Chat or PM me? So let's say the avg. cost per click for SD is £0.50 and by improving their ad quality (which won't happen) we take their avg. cost per click down to £0.40. We're still going to be costing Sd 40p every time we click on the ads and the idea is to use up their daily budget so the ads won't show, so it makes no difference anyway. I work with pay per click on a daily basis and believe me, ad quality and quality don't have that big an impact on ad position. Google is a business, they want money so your bid amount is by far the biggest factor they look at OK. Last thing from me. If we use your example and flesh it out a bit more. Let's hypothetically say we're talking about the keyword "rugby ball". Let's say in a typical week 2000 people click on the SD ad for "rugby ball". And it originally costs £0.50. That's a weekly cost of 2000*0.50 = £1000 on that keyword. Let's now say we manage to artificially inflate those 2000 clicks to say 2100 people clicking fraudulently, increasing CTR and reducing CPC down to £0.40. Then their weekly cost becomes 2100*0.40 = £840. So even though those 100 additional clicks don't lead to any additional sales, you've made their activity more efficient. That's a hypothetical situation, I understand that. But it's totally plausible in the Google Ads set up, and its something I've seen a lot (but with legitimate reasons for increased clicks). Google are indeed a business, but they want Advertiser's money - and they will only continue to get that as long as Google Ads provides value for them, they are not interested in inflating costs for short term gains. I too work on Paid Search for a living. Maybe PM me and we can have a chat about it. I might even be able to save you some money! Ha! If none of us here have been clicking on their ads and now we are, we are costing them £1000 that (if your calculations are correct) could drop to £840, but firstly that's probably money they weren't spending before and secondly by using up the budget with no intention to buy anything we are stopping them from generating revenue through their paid ads for the whole day (assuming we can use up their daily budget). That's the only equation you need to know. You're massively overcomplicating something that is very simple.

This bit definitely isn't true. Quality score is one secondary factor in the PPC auction. The primary factor is your bid amount. Even if we positively impacted the quality score (which we won't) their ads might gain one position. They don't automatically jump to position 1 because a few people clicked on them. Google also monitors things like bounce-back - people who click on an ad and then bounce straight back to the search results, which tells Google the ad isn't relevant. That's essentially what we're doing. If we inadvertently I don't want to get into an argument about this. But... Quality Score and Ad Quality are not just secondary factors in the auction. They are a key component of Ad Rank and Actual Cost Per Click. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6297?hl=en-GB If an ad starts to get consistently higher CTR, then it will be deemed higher quality and more relevant. This could result in a position boost and reduction in CPC premium. I never suggested it would rocket them into position 1 on the page, but I would argue any increase, no matter how small, is counter to the motivation for doing this in the first place. Also Bounce Rate is not a factor in Ad Quality. Google took a stance on this as its a misleading metric. If someone goes to a website and immediately finds what they are looking for and leaves, that's a bounce - and its not an indicator of poor user experience or irrelevance. Some (non-Google) people suggest that it factors into Landing Page Experience, but there is no evidence to suggest this is true, and no documentation from Google Ads suggesting it to be the case. CTR is however a major factor in calculating Quality Score and Ad Quality, as stated in some of the Google Ads articles I shared earlier. I wholeheartedly and genuinely think this will be a futile exercise. Anyway, Paid Search debates aren't everyone's cup of tea, so maybe we start another thread in Chat or PM me? So let's say the avg. cost per click for SD is £0.50 and by improving their ad quality (which won't happen) we take their avg. cost per click down to £0.40. We're still going to be costing Sd 40p every time we click on the ads and the idea is to use up their daily budget so the ads won't show, so it makes no difference anyway. I work with pay per click on a daily basis and believe me, ad quality and quality don't have that big an impact on ad position. Google is a business, they want money so your bid amount is by far the biggest factor they look at

This bit definitely isn't true. Quality score is one secondary factor in the PPC auction. The primary factor is your bid amount. Even if we positively impacted the quality score (which we won't) their ads might gain one position. They don't automatically jump to position 1 because a few people clicked on them. Google also monitors things like bounce-back - people who click on an ad and then bounce straight back to the search results, which tells Google the ad isn't relevant. That's essentially what we're doing.

Man Utd kit/strip are pretty much there all the time for me

That's the key, empty stadium is unrealistic unfortunately so this is the best approach. Previously owning nufc was a benefit to SD with no major drawbacks. With the social media stuff it's still a benefit but currently must be an annoyance. The next step is to turn that annoyance into something more where it has a financial impact. This all kicked off around 18th July.... https://www.newcastle-online.org/forum/index.php?topic=99882.11450 And this has happened to the SD share price since, a share price which was previously going up.... Of course, maybe this is all coincidence, but I really don't think so. I am utterly convinced this is having an impact, it's the only notable thing which has happened to SD since 18th July which could explain this continued descent of the share price, unless someone would like to tell me otherwise? And Ashley will be 100% aware of the connection too. He'll wake up every single morning and the first thing he'll do is check the share prices. I believe there's a connection between the 2, but what's way more important is that he'll believe there's a connection too and he'll be fucking furious. Would you want to invest in a company that has an active revolt against it? You'd think the share price would increase since the guy who essentially owns it has just bought another well known high street chain that he'll no doubt be filling with Donnay shite imminently

I still think you'll get filtered out. Even with VPN and browser tricks. Google are pretty smart. If they see suspicious activity in anyway, they err on the side of caution and don't charge the Advertiser. Even assuming you don't get filtered out, 3 clicks a day is going to be costing an Advertiser not very much. Especially in the context of all the genuine traffic a big advertiser might be getting - you'll be accounting for 0.00000001% of spend. My advice would be to not waste your time. Google make their $40bn per year of revenue (or whatever the figure is) from exactly the paid advertising we're talking about. It's in their interests to not be too thorough with the clickfraud filtering so they almost certainly won't pick up on the kind of tactics we're using. Think about natural search engine behaviour - is it realistic for a person to click on a paid ad once or twice per day for a week or two? Of course it is if you're comparing football boots and you're thorough. Is it natural behaviour for someone to click on the same ad 20 times in 5 minutes? No

As far as i'm concerned this could be the activity that is most likely to be brought up at board level. Web sales/activity will be reported to the board just as the figures from each of his physical tat stores will be - it's the same for all retailers. If we can make a dent in the sales from shutting down one of their major advertising channels + social media then eventually questions will be asked

Adwords geo-targeting is done via IP as well and a lot of UK IPs are registered to London regardless of where you live, so it would only filter out those people whose IPs are actually registered to Newcastle/North East. Could explain why some people are seeing the ads and some aren't

I couldnt on me phone searching for Chelsea Jersey but did on me iPad. Once I clicked it thought then went back to do it again the AD was removed so it must remember your ip address That's the problem with this approach, it relies on lots of people from different IPs clicking once, maybe twice. Otherwise Google's Clickfraud monitor will pick up on it and SD won't be charged beyond the first click

Problem is they rank well in Google's organic results for so many search terms that they'll only use Adwords to fill in the gaps where they don't rank. You can also set your ads to show on certain days and at certain times of day. The image results at the top of Google are usually ads as well. I phone an SD ad when i searched for 'Newcastle kit' and 'NUFC kit'. Give that a go.

Have you sent this info to the Magpie Group lot? No, i was thinking of doing that but I don't know how to get in touch with them They've got their social links and email address at the top of their website: https://twitter.com/TheMagpieGroup_, https://www.facebook.com/TheMagpieGroupNUFC or [email protected], take your pick. Cheers. I'll drop them an email now

Have you sent this info to the Magpie Group lot? No, i was thinking of doing that but I don't know how to get in touch with them

The same will work if you click on any banner/remarketing ads as well. They are designed to generate revenue so if you click on them and buy nothing it's just wasted SD budget. Go onto the sports direct website and then visit a few random websites - you'll probably be followed around by SD ads

Pay per click on ads works, at least. Not sure they'll care much though. I'm sure the basket thing doesn't, though Sports Direct assign a daily budget to their PPC campaigns. Once that budget is used up their ads stop showing until the next day. If the budget is used up the in the morning for £0 revenue then that's it for the day, unless they add more budget.

The pay per click one will work until Google spots a pattern and stops charging per click, but that wouldn't kick in any time soon. Google's clickfraud is mainly to stop competitors repeatedly clicking on each others' ads to cost them money. Lots of random people clicking on different ads from the same advertiser is unlikely to be flagged.

Search for something like 'nike trainers' or 'tennis rackets' and they'll appear somewhere at the top. There'll be a small 'ad' label next to the listing. And obviously spread the word far and wide

I mentioned this a while ago but I don't think anything got done - Sports Direct do paid advertising in Google on a pay per click basis. Every time you click on their ads they pay an amount to Google, maybe £0.50-1.00. The advertiser sets a daily budget and the idea is that your advertising expenditure is significantly less than the sales you generate from the traffic. Google guards against people just clicking on an ad multiple times but probably wouldn't do anything about 20,000 people clicking once. I don't think it would take long to stop SD from being able to advertise on Google and believe me, that will probably be their biggest online revenue driver.

Well he's going to have a fucking horrible time then.

On a positive note, we only ever have to watch that game once.

I might as well have gone down the local park to watch a Saturday league game. It’d be a miles better standard than this fucking nonsense