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Refusal by Google to remove fraudulent Apps from Display targeting
For a few days, we have an app, that is drawing ridiculous amounts of impressions compared to our other URLs. We’re talking 10’s of thousands of impressions when other URLs and apps have maybe 100.
These are called:
mobileapp::2-info.sunista.app
and
mobileapp::2-ir.topcoders.nstaxWhen we try to exclude these from the campaign, we get an error message saying they could not be removed from the campaign.
So we got in contact with Google Support, who said they’d remove it, just to then be stumped when they also could not remove these links from our targeting. A few hours later they explained:
“This email is in regards to the query which you have raised about excluding the placements in your Google Ads account XXXXXXXXX.
As discussed, we have escalated the query to the concerned team and found that there is no issue at our end.
1)Maybe the URL that you are trying to exclude doesn’t exist as mentioned in the error message, please try to exclude it by app ID if you have one.
2)Or the app might have been removed or changed its name/id or maybe it’s not even connected to the google network.
That is the reason we were able to remove the other placements but not these.”
They cannot be serious, can they? If the apps are not connected to them or not exist, then why are they still showing thousands of impressions on those platforms today? These seem like clear click fraud apps.
Did anyone have a similar issue? Or anyone have an idea how to solve this? I’m thinking of just going whitelist, which will massively reduce the reach of the campaign, but at this point seems to be the only way to move forward…
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1 Reply
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Try doing it in ads editor; for some reason app exclusions are much easier to do there and sometimes they’ll take with ads editor and won’t in platform.
I generally exclude all mobile apps, FWIW. It’s nearly always miss-clicks or bad traffic unless you are whitelisting specific apps or categories.
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If they made it easy to exclude mobile apps, everyone would exclude it and Google would make less money. They have made it really difficult to exclude app placements over the years.
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Just exclude ALL mobile apps.
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