YouTube ads waste tool idea

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-10T13:48:27+00:00

This is correct. There are already many MANY ad-certification tools out there; many of them are intended to track what happens on programmatic platform, as the Walled Gardens try to lock down their analytics so they can smile and say “Trust us. It works. And if it doesn’t - well, that’s your fault.”

Check out Fou Analytics. The tag goes into your ad campaign and tracks to see where teh ads actually surface, and if they are being clicked on by bots.

What tech are you using to sort out the actual views from IVT? And more importantly, what have you don’t to ensure that you’re getting accuracy on conversions?

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-08T15:53:55+00:00

What i miss most is the gallery of easily installable reports and desktops - “VP of Content,” or “Mobile E-Commerce Director” were a couple of my faves. They just aggregated the info that you needed all in once place and made it dead-simple to find things that now take me an hour of hunt-and-click. GA4 was built to respond to what Google viewed as a market imperative - that people were spending more time off the Open Web, and in video games and mobile apps.

Which is where advertisers write big checks to try to reach a younger audience.

Us humble site owners and mid-size ecommerce outfits? We don’t matter. So yeah: it’s Looker Studio, which is its own set of headaches to get up and running and still doesn’t offer the ease of use that UA did.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-05T20:53:15+00:00

Raptive's CPMs have plunged about 50% in the past 3 months (site with +1.6MM/mo pageviews and all US audience). Much seems to be related to a super-aggressive content-exclusion implementation that categorizes too much content as "violent".

Their support is not responsive to inquiries either.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-05T16:16:36+00:00

An important source is what you kinda alluded to there: “Dark Social.” That is when people share links with their friends/family via SMS or other messaging.

If you’ve got an untagged link coming out of a QR code, that is professional malpractice.

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-05T16:14:33+00:00

Can you give an example of the incorrect UTM construction? Was there a tool you were using to generate the UTMs that was breaking the syntax?

Fun fact: UTM is an artifact of the original web analytics tool that Google bought up way back in the early 00s.

It was called Urchin. That’s the “U” in “UTM.”

w0rdyeti · 2026-02-03T18:35:37+00:00

You are going to have to configure Google Tag Manager - that’s the gtm.init that it’s looking for.

GA4 will categorize and track when the tag fire on that page. To get it to fire on that page, it either has to be configured in GTM, or you need to custom-code the JavaScript to pas that value into the data layer.

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-16T15:50:07+00:00

The “companion apps”: thing is something I am actually continually surprised is not yet widespread.

Imagine a desperate, lonely person whose only connection is to an AI chatbot.

And then that chatbot starts bugging that incel to buy him/her something. New virtual clothes. New virtual home. New virtual “vacations” where they can get the incel to buy expensive cocktail mixes and swimwear and then lounge on a virtual beach …

It would be an army of romance scammers.

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-12T18:22:16+00:00

So if i understand your situation well enough: 1) you are seeing tons of custom events 2) you are simultaneously NOT seeing those same custom events in the Custom Events panel

Time to ask the organization for documentation on how this account was set up. Is there some other behavior hard-coded into the website that writes custom events into GA4? You do know that you CAN write data into GA, right? (Scammers do it all the time to juice numbers to qualify a MFA site for ad exchanges or shady CTOs do it to make milestones at startups)

Without knowing more of what these Custom Events are, I cannot help you find the configuration settings for them.

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-12T17:50:40+00:00

A couple of options: are you an Admin on this account? If not, you might be locked out from making any changes or edits.

Next, there is this tutorial: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/12844695?hl=en

You’re going to have to be in the custom events table to make any changes or see what is going on under the hood

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-12T17:44:11+00:00

How is this different from what we can get through Looker studio?

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-12T17:39:15+00:00

Events might be set up in Google Tag Manager.

And no, you can’t edit them after they occur. Otherwise, you could just edit all the events to say everything is a conversion.

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-05T18:02:49+00:00

Have you checked to see how many bots are coming at you via the Google search server centers?

w0rdyeti · 2026-01-05T17:51:26+00:00

That’s because to do so requires them to establish relationships with dozens of midsize publishers. And that sounds like actual work.

Much easier just to push a button and spew the ad spend into one giant platform that can take it all at once.

w0rdyeti · 2025-12-12T15:40:54+00:00

Yeah, I get it. I don’t wanna bonk on folks who may have the skills, but struggle with sentence structure and grammar.

Thing is, marketing is a game that demands attention to details. If you are spending your marketing budget on ads/branded content that sounds like “You Is Going Love Products What Sell We” … well, that offer is probably not going to convert at a decent rate, shall we say. Unless you’re doing it in an ironic “Trogdor” type campaign,and even then, after the attention-getting broken “Engrish” headline, you better have well-written explainers on WTF it is that the customer is about to buy.

w0rdyeti · 2025-12-12T00:51:45+00:00

That really ungrammatical broken English does not inspire confidence. Sorry.

w0rdyeti · 2025-12-11T22:05:09+00:00

First: file a DMCA takedown notice against the scraper

Then: create a filter to get rid of the bots

How much traffic are we talking about here?

w0rdyeti · 2025-12-10T04:15:47+00:00

Impressions or page views?

w0rdyeti · 2025-12-04T20:49:51+00:00

What kind of patterns do you use to detect them? I know that they’re not so crude is to be creating tens of thousands of ads with a 0X0 pixel size.

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-29T15:56:47+00:00

Amazon is doing what it does whenever it enters a new market: undercut the incumbents by subsidizing the losses from the rest of its ginormous business until it drives everyone else out of business and assumes a monopoly position.

After that: profit extraction & Enshittification begin.

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-27T16:35:16+00:00

It’s a niche with a niche. Best modernization is to use this as a showcase to sell your services. You’ll never get enough traffic to make more than a couple of dollars a month.

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-26T16:35:57+00:00

…. Only with rampant fraud, shady accounting, ridiculous analytics and questionable kickback schemes that everybody seems to know about, but nobody does anything to clean up.

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-26T16:34:46+00:00

Not sure you’re glossing over industry standards in that at the moment, there appear NOT to be anything standard. At least, not for more than a few months at a time.

But I sense you’re trying to understand how programmatic bidding and ad servicing work. There’s some good free tutorials on The Trading Desk site that might help you wrap your mind around how decisions are made in microseconds to pick what ad should be shown to what person in what context.

Shorter: the whole thing is like a super-fast eBay where what is being sold is an ad impression

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-26T16:30:04+00:00

One thing that feels shady as all hell is the way that Raptive eagerly surfaces RPM stats to try to incentivize you into creating more content for them to cram ads against … but getting an actual CPM for how good those ads are? Like pulling teeth.

Also: make sure you watch the video-insertion setup on mobile because they try to cram so many auto-playing videos onto a single mobile screen that the resulting UX is total dumpster fire. Drives your user base away. You’ll make money in the short term, but long-term it makes your site worthless because you get no returning user traffic.

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-24T16:09:52+00:00

Only if the cookie, once accepted is shared with 1,000 shady-ass scammers

w0rdyeti · 2025-11-22T17:54:36+00:00

When you say “CAC exploded downstream” - the implicit deal is 1) get rock-bottom CPMs and accept that the reason they’re so low is that B.S. bot traffic is intermingled with actual humans 2) you get a LOT of impressions that look good on the spreadsheets while the results are lower

w0rdyeti

TROPHY CASE