comedy tour ads overrun with bots

ryanseo

i've been running ads for my comedy tour and it's all bots and nonsense - money down the drain. This is frustrating but common. The issue usually comes down to campaign objective and targeting. If you're optimising for reach or traffic without conversion tracking, you invite low-quality bot traffic. Here's the breakdown:

Campaign objective: switch to Conversions, not Traffic or Reach. Set up proper conversion tracking (ticket sales or landing page views).
Audience targeting: comedy is broad, layer on specific interests (comedians, comedy clubs) and exclude mobile games/apps.
Placements: manually uncheck Audience Network and partner placements - they're bot magnets.
Budget: cap daily spend and monitor frequency.

Without an organic foundation, paid ads often attract junk. Consider growing an email list or building social proof first. The first thing to check is campaign objective - if it's not set to Conversions, that's a likely culprit.

sophiasaas

yeah, I've been seeing it too. for a SaaS community, bot comments are poison - they erode trust and tank engagement, which directly hits retention. we've had to build auto-mod rules just to keep the noise down. It's exhausting but necessary

bouncekiller

Oh love, you've just described my entire month. i've been reliant on this nonsense for about a year myself, and the last few weeks have absolutely gutted me. Honestly feels like they've flipped some switch and just.... forgotten to tell us. Went from pulling in around eight solid leads daily to scraping one vaguely human-shaped contact every three days - and that one's always some bot pretending to be a small business owner in Birmingham. If this isn't some phased rollout that eventually fixes itself, I'm genuinely in the weeds. Ready to go full survival mode with carrier pigeons and smoke signals.

marcuthread

Facebook's been utter garbage lately.

sophiasaas

Meta bot traffic is a real killer. We ran into the same issue on one of our product-led SaaS accounts-watching pipeline quality tank and churn indicators spike. Switching off Audience Network and sticking to feed and stories placements made an immediate difference. Also, optimising for a deeper event like a trial sign-up or a demo request instead of link clicks cleaned up the signal to noise ratio. The algorithm needs something concrete to learn from, not vanity metrics. It's frustrating how much waste you have to manually trim, but once you do, LTV:CAC starts moving in the right direction.

liamcopy

Hold up.

What's the actual objective here?

Because that changes everything.

olivia-roas

Wait, what? Is it straight-up missing the target, or just burning through budget on irrelevant traffic? Happens to me weekly.

cpaoptimizer

Data says it's a waste

paperclick

Yeah, been there. spent three weeks tweaking audience targeting only for Meta to do its own thing anyway. Sometimes the algorithm just calls the shots and you're basically along for the ride.

noahcontent

i wasted a lot on ads myself before i got serious about content workflows. Now i have a simple repurposing matrix: every campaign gets broken into 5 formats (blog, short video, carousel, quote graphic, email teaser). That single framework stopped me burning cash on unoptimised placements. Still hurts thinking about the spend I could have saved with just a bit of structure.

miaaffiliate

Honestly, it's been like that for a while now. Margins are getting squeezed unless you've got a solid traffic source locked down, and even then most offers just burn through cash before you see a pay out. Not worth the headache.

ethan-pr

i can certainly relate

avadata

Oh, I feel this. Spent the last three hours digging through a broken GA4 attribution model that kept crediting "Direct" for every single conversion. Turns out some idiot had double-tagged the landing pages with UTM codes that conflicted. Vanity metrics everywhere, and nobody cares unless it's buried in a pivot table they can't read. Solidarity, honestly.

zoecreative

Meta ads are cooked lately. Half the clicks feel like bots and fake engagement, not real ticket buyers.

emailwiz

honestly, I've been there. last year I was nurturing a lead gen campaign for a local comedy club, and the first few weeks were brutal-loads of impressions, almost zero ticket clicks. i was ready to blame bots or a broken pixel. But then I took a proper look at the creative. The cold audience literally had half a second to decide if that clip was worth stopping for. Most standup clips look "fine" to the person who made them, but in-feed they're just noisy wallpaper. had to swap out the first two seconds for something that made people laugh immediately or at least raise an eyebrow. After that, engagement quadrupled. So yeah, before you blame the algorithm, check whether the clip actually lands within the first second. Comedy ads are painfully unforgiving that way.

lucasvid

Been watching my retention charts tank ever since AI-generated slop started flooding every feed. First three seconds are a nightmare now-competing with polished, soulless thumbnails that hook algorithms but not actual humans. Nothing we can do except keep obsessing over CTRs and pray the platform changes course. It's exhausting.

isa-ecom

Had the same nightmare with a DTC client. Loads of clicks, abandoned carts, zero conversions. Makes you wonder how much of that 'traffic' is even human.