I feel that way when I stressed about doing something for days and when I finally did it it took 20 minutes

And don’t even try to do a conversion of text to numbers in a big column. There’s a super fast way (name is eluding me) but if you respond to the error popup I imagine it looks at each cell of text, thinks says, “abracadabra you’re now a number!” for every row. It takes that long

My favorite, since I’m not a programmer anymore, is excel

E: Your formula has a circular reference. I ain’t doing shit till you fix it

Me: where?

E: In your spreadsheet, I don’t fucking know

I never am!

(Ok I’m wrong about that)

Well yes, now. But they could have shaped it better early on. But it’s apple, their greed is boundless

They welcomed constant payments, especially the exploitative ones. They loved their cut

They could have restricted the amount you’d buy at once instead of absurd things like $99 options or games that blocked you from playing after every 20 minutes unless you coughed up more dough.

They loved it and couldn’t get enough.

It just encouraged developers to track $/user or % paying users and other shitty metrics that if they were not hit they purposely made their game worse to frustrate users

Ahh the Free To Play playbook. Have to pay to not be frustrated. Ironically what Apple ushered in

That almost never happens. The best way is to stop advertising and call out their team when they beg you to reconsider

It’s worth it to get their reports though. Some of my happiest moments at work is to see the complete dogshit reports agencies and ad companies put out.

If you’re ever feeling like a loser think you’re bad at your job, suffer from imposter syndrome, one of Facebook’s, reddit’s, or any other big company’s ad reports will brighten up your life with how bad it is

I’d be happy to walk you through how this works. It’s way less than you think

But if you just want to see for yourself, visit a site with Omnibug as a browser extension (F12 to bring up the panel)

You can see every bit of data going to Google analytics from your machine. You could be the only person ever to visit my site and I would not be able to figure out anything about you

So, love this stuff. It’s been my career for nearly 20 years

Check out the engagement rate/bounce rate on those. I bet it’s 15% engagement, tops (meaning 85% bounced). Probably as low as 5%

That’s typical for ads like this. You’re right that you’re losing half your traffic (though I would pick sessions, not users, to see it a bit clearer. GA4 makes it more difficult but you should be able to create it).

What happens is users scroll, users accidentally click, and immediately hit back because, oh shit, they didn’t want to click. Ad registers a click, browser window is closed before your gtag registers. I bet their own pixel doesn’t even fire, if you have it on the site

Then the ones who don’t close it in time, that’s what you’re seeing in reporting. When your bosses or the marketing team ask what those users did, you can confidently say, without looking, “nothing” and you will be right 99% of the time.

Now, we could argue that display ads are NOT for direct responses. They are to supplement other campaigns so your brand is freshwe when you do something better like paid search or emails. But if they want to charge by the click, it’s still useless traffic.

Does Reddit offer CPA (cost per action)? Doubt it, since the sub-0.05% conversion rate means they’ll get almost nothing, and they know it.

Also, look into Looker studio for these reports (free with GA), since GA4 sucks so bad right now. Hit me up with a PM if you haven’t used it but want some free pointers or lesson (I have a FT job, I’m not scrounging for freelance work)

Dunno it seems like a ground up rebuild

I ain’t but various branches are. Knee branch and elbow branch have reached EOL

Well at least their search function is good…

Oh wait it’s complete shit

Well, I work with a lot of Europeans and man, they complain too. About how hard it is to take all the vacation they’re required to take during the year. The US grinds everyone to dust

Even funner is getting your vacation approved, then turning in your notice. Thanks for letting me not even be here (they weren’t going to pay out that vacay)

When I was younger and worked a job in the summer right before going back to college, a manager thought it was a good idea to be an asshole for no reason to me

I endured until break and just never came back. See ya

That’s fine. We all need to rest after serious procedures and computers are no different

And then you help them anyway.

Them: how’d you figure it out?

Me: I typed your problem into Google and read the page it recommended. You should try it

Tried 9.4.5, couldn’t get around to 9.4.6

At this point who cares. Even the perception of things increasing will help get people’s attention and get them to try it out