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Got 81% click rate on GMail ads

Since DetoxBox is all about fighting spam on your GMail page, I figured that GMail ads would be the best place to advertise it. And I was right: I have added "Black Friday" as keywords and placed a GMail ad, choosing "Health & Fitness Buffs, Lifestyles & Hobbies" as my target audience, and got 216 impressions and 171 clicks (81% CTR) before they banned my ad for "Malicious software".

Now, the landing page was rather sketchy, I admit, I've made a better one using Umso since then, so I'm trying it again, hope this time it won't be banned.

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    Hey Artem,

    That's a really high CTR - that's great.

    But I washed out with Gmail Ads. I spent about $500 experimenting, got the CTR pretty high (60% ish), and ultimately 1000s of clicks, but never a single conversion and only single digit clicks to my website.

    The annoying thing with Gmail Ads is Google is charging you for the click on the ad (to open the email), not for the click to your website. I got the impression people love to open emails, to mark them as read, for the feeling of being 'done'. And as advertisers, we get charged for that :-/

    What kinds of CTR to your website were you seeing?

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      Arghhh you're completely right! I assumed that all these clicks were to my website. Now I see that I had only 4 visitors, one of them probably myself.

      That's a nice way of ripping advertizers.

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      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      I don't know what's with the Malicious software, I've moved the landing page to Umso and added a bit of copy, and now my ads are banned because of "Enabling dishonest behavior". It looks like my account is damned, or once they start banning ads they just can't stop. They used "bad image quality" for blurred parts of an image, "Copyrighted content" for the "Try for free" callout, and even "Birth control" for a text that read "an elderly woman visits a doctor".

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        I'm guessing there's a lot of bad actors in that space generally, and their AI has naively classified your ad into the same bucket as those bad actors.

        And like you said, once their tooling has tasted blood, it won't let it go :-/

        Hopefully if you start a new campaign, and maybe a different domain, you'll get a completely fresh start.

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      Well, I was too quick to celebrate. As the @andymitchell wrote, 81% is the open rate of this "promoted email", the actual CTR was much much lower. Fortunately, 171 "clicks" cost me only €2.46.

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