This is inadmissible

[visualstudios]

@Kesha Starting a few days ago, I've been bombarded with spam contacts, all promoted, from South America (brazil, colombia, etc.). None of them are interested in buying at all, and it just started recently. They want to either ask for work, beg for money.

I did not get, in over a month, a single serious lead through promoted gigs.

I asked one of them how did they find us, and they just said "I googled how to make money editing video" (in portuguese), and that lead them to our fiverr profile (through promoted gigs).

Fiverr is actively advertising for us to appear in these types of irrelevant searches, and considering it as "promoted gigs", costing us money and time.

This is totally unacceptable marketing on Fiverr's part.

I don't want my profile to be out there for people to contact me when searching for ways to make money video editing. I want to be contacted by people who want to pay me to edit their video.

And I don't want to advertise to South America AT ALL, that's not my target market. I should be able to select the target markets for my promoted gigs, like I can with ads on any other platform.

I just deactivated promoted gigs, and I suggest everyone does the same. If Fiverr doesn't learn how to properly advertise, for qualified leads, they'll stay deactivated. It's Fiverr's loss. 

 

 

Edited September 1 by visualstudios

[visualstudios]

Oh, by the way - brilliant stats for the month, "promoted gigs" is working really well. I wonder why I don't sell through them, when I'm being advertised like this, to people googling "how to make money". 

For all I know, the vast majority of those 319 clicks may well have been that, since I can't know what the people who didn't message were thinking - and the people who did message were ALL looking for me to give them work / money / advice, and none to buy my gigs.

Edited September 1 by visualstudios

[maitasun]

I know the feeling, @visualstudios, and can relate.

It happened to me in April. More than 320 clicks from April 1 to April 26. Not only did I have to pay for all those fraudulent clicks but I also had to reply to all those messages just to keep my response rate safe. I stopped promoting that gig on the spot.

In June, I gave it another shot hoping everything was back to normal. Yeah, right... 2 hours after I started promoting the gig again, the nightmare began. Since then, I stopped promoting that gig.

 

[visualstudios]

@maitasun I had gotten some spam in the past with promoted gigs, but it was different in nature - mostly new sellers trying to get work, that found me in the platform, and from the... usual suspects, countrywise. That's to be expected, to an extent, with promoted gigs - your gigs are promoted on the platform, so people can click them, and idiots will click them, it is what it is.

This is different. Fiverr is geographically advertising me to south america, for some reason, on freaking google search, and doing it for people searching for ridiculous terms ("how to make money online"), and sending me that traffic, while charging me for their clicks. And they only started doing this recently - I went for months with no promoted contacts, and suddenly I get several contacts, all from brazil/colombia/etc - and nowhere else - in a day? It's clearly targeted.

This is much worse, and it's impossible to understand why they're doing it at all - other than to scam people who have promoted gigs out of their money. They're probably not even making any money on this, since they need to pay for the google ads in the first place. It's nonsensical.

Who thought this was a good idea? Why? What's the reasoning? What do they think they're gaining by "promoting" to totally irrelevant people, searching for crappy keywords on google? They won't buy anything, so Fiverr won't make commission. Sellers don't want to pay for garbage traffic, so they'll turn off promoted gigs. Fiverr loses twice. I don't get it.

Edited September 1 by visualstudios

[maitasun]

I've been thinking, although I could be wrong, that these people are using bots to find us. Where? I don't know. Maybe, as you say, through Google. But they're not targeting $5 gigs.

I have never been spammed in such a way as then. It was total madness! And 90% of the spammers were from Brazil—although the location could have been fake. I don't know because I didn't engage. I simply reported all of them as they came, one after the other, in just a few minutes.

Edited September 1 by maitasun

[visualstudios]

23 minutes ago, maitasun said:

I've been thinking, although I could be wrong, that these people are using bots to find us. Where? I don't know. Maybe, as you say, through Google. But they're not targeting $5 gigs.

It's just way too weird - why would people start using bots just to come here to ask sellers for money/work out of nowhere? That's not how people asking for that work. Doesn't make sense. These people are not sophisticated. They're total noobs, with no idea of what they're doing.

What does make sense is if Fiverr is advertising it - that would explain the sudden influx of people from a location - Fiverr turned on ads targeting them. And the ads are bad, and don't make sense, and show up to people looking to make money online, and those people are too stupid to understand that those ads are not gonna make them money, so they click them because they do not understand what Fiverr is or how it works. That's it. Occam's razor.

Edited September 1 by visualstudios

[filipdevaere]

FYI: I have been finding some of my gigs on Google for a long time. This is not something that has just surfaced. This has been going on for years.

I keep repeating it: Fiverr is a company that only wants to make a profit. That is why they do things like this. Fiverr is not a charity. They want to generate income. I do not blame them. If I were in their position I would do the same.

For me, since this year I have been getting more buyers from the United Kingdom than in other years. I do not use promoted gigs, but I suspect that I am showing up in the search results in the UK more than usual. RTO is enabled for me so that is why I see more interest coming from the UK.

Remember that Fiverr also recommends using social media. No reputable seller is going to recommend this because it very rarely yields a result. The only thing it does is that “curious” people might click on your gigs. And that is what Fiverr wants. Clicks on the “promoted” gigs. Fiverr knows that most people who discover Fiverr through social media will most likely never buy anything. They just want the clicks.

[mateusbl]

9 hours ago, visualstudios said:

for qualified leads

You are right, we should be able to select the target audience, age, industry and also based on the buyer budget. You know Fiverr has all these statistics, we should be able to direct our ads like all other platform does: Google, Instagram and others.

[priyank_mod]

2 hours ago, mateusbl said:

You are right, we should be able to select the target audience, age, industry and also based on the buyer budget. You know Fiverr has all these statistics, we should be able to direct our ads like all other platform does: Google, Instagram and others.

And we are in 2024!! These platforms had custom targeting features since forever.

I have duly received my promoted ad invoices for the last 2 months without a single order from ads. (though I didn't receive any spam texts but who knows where the paid clicks came from)🥲

[visualstudios]

8 hours ago, filipdevaere said:

I keep repeating it: Fiverr is a company that only wants to make a profit. That is why they do things like this. Fiverr is not a charity. They want to generate income. I do not blame them. If I were in their position I would do the same.

No you wouldn't, because this is nonsense. This is bad marketing, they are targeting people with ads that are not gonna buy anything. They are wasting money on worthless ads that lead to no sales, therefore no profit. The little they can make on promoted gigs, is being spent on the ads anyway. 

I repeat, it's worthless to show an ad for my gigs for someone searching for "how can I make money editing video". They'll make no money out of it, and it will make Fiverr look bad (I'll make sure of that when I send the person away and speak my mind to them).

Yes, Fiverr is for profit. Yes Fiverr wants to generate revenue. Therefore, Fiverr must do good marketing, and qualify leads, so those leads buy things, and Fiverr gets their commission. Clicks by themselves only cost money in ads, they're not getting it back through promoted gigs (I'm paying $0.0 per click lmao), they gain nothing by spamming garbage.

Edited September 1 by visualstudios

[visualstudios]

22 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

I have duly received my promoted ad invoices for the last 2 months without a single order from ads.

Maybe it's time to turn it off, no?

[priyank_mod]

1 minute ago, visualstudios said:

Maybe it's time to turn it off, no?

I don't run it regularly. I have used it only for a few weeks in the last 3 years. So net invoice amount is not very high but had zero ROI (in last 2 months). 

On the contrary, my ads in Dec'23 gave me a few repeat buyers and ROI was kinda 10-12X. 

[filipdevaere]

8 minutes ago, visualstudios said:

Clicks by themselves only cost money in ads, they're not getting it back through promoted gigs

As far as I remember, Fiverr gets money for every click.

[visualstudios]

57 minutes ago, filipdevaere said:

As far as I remember, Fiverr gets money for every click.

Yes - next to nothing. I'm paying less than 1 cent per click. In addition, according to @Kesha, sellers are supposed to be reimbursed for spam clicks, so Fiverr should be making effectively zero on those..

And of course they're paying more than that to run ads, and in server costs to get the traffic. Even if they did not reimburse me for the spam (which would go against what they claim), they would still lose money. Makes no sense, Fiverr actively loses money by advertising to people who have no interest in buying at all.

Edited September 1 by visualstudios

[mandyzines]

4 hours ago, priyank_mod said:

(though I didn't receive any spam texts but who knows where the paid clicks came from

It's probably other curious sellers trying to get ideas for their own gigs. I'm certain that happened to me most of the time Nov. - Jan. 

[williambryan392]

16 hours ago, visualstudios said:

Yes - next to nothing. I'm paying less than 1 cent per click

Wow. I'm jealous. In August the lowest I paid is 22 cents and the highest is 56 cents a click across my consulting gigs. 

I'm not currently promoting my other higher cost services like business plans and pitch decks, but when I have I've been paying up to/around $2 a click.

That racks up fast so I turned it off for those gigs.

[visualstudios]

6 hours ago, williambryan392 said:

Wow. I'm jealous. In August the lowest I paid is 22 cents and the highest is 56 cents a click across my consulting gigs. 

My cpc was set at the lowest it can go, 2 cents. I would set it at less, if I could. I do not trust fiverr whatsoever with marketing, they're terrible at it. Now I just deactivated it, and until I see Fiverr come out with actual changes, will not activate them again, the results have been appalling. 

Edited September 2 by visualstudios

[williambryan392]

26 minutes ago, visualstudios said:

My cpc was set at the lowest it can go, 2 cents.

Aha, understood! I should've figured that out myself!

 

[texvox]

On 9/1/2024 at 7:45 AM, visualstudios said:

Yes - next to nothing. I'm paying less than 1 cent per click. In addition, according to @Kesha, sellers are supposed to be reimbursed for spam clicks, so Fiverr should be making effectively zero on those..

And of course they're paying more than that to run ads, and in server costs to get the traffic. Even if they did not reimburse me for the spam (which would go against what they claim), they would still lose money. Makes no sense, Fiverr actively loses money by advertising to people who have no interest in buying at all.

I've had a few folks over the past 6-8 months send me messages marked "Promoted" attempting to solicit me to buy their service. I reached out to customer service and the response I received was "I'm sorry but we have no way to confirm this was a promoted ad click." I responded with "But it says 'promoted' right here...[insert screenshot] and most of my first-time messages do not...[insert further screenshots]." Their response? "I see that you can see that it says 'promoted.' Unfortunately we have no way to confirm this was in fact a promoted click internally."

So I am confused about Kesha saying that sellers are supposed to be reimbursed for wrongful/spam clicks. Do you have a link to where she said this? I'd like to reach back out to Customer Service for round 2 to get my paid clicks back.

[alphagev]

Same thing here. Used the Promoted Gigs and got only spam messages

[visualstudios]

@texvox She seems suspiciously absent from this thread, though.

[mateusbl]

@visualstudios

2 minutes ago, visualstudios said:

absent from this thread

Is useless point these issues, they know about it... and don't seem to be interested to fix these problems:

- Buyers abusing of Unlimited Extension of Time

- Fake Users clicking in promotion

 

[Kesha]

Hi @visualstudios! 

Any promotions Fiverr does off the platform is not considered as "Promoted Gigs" and therefore you should not be charged for any of those clicks.

I do understand your frustration when it comes to being contacted by such irrelevant leads. I appreciate the feedback and have passed it along to the appropriate team. 

[visualstudios]

@Kesha If they aren't considered "promoted gigs", why does the contact say "promoted" in the first message, and is telling me they found my profile through searching on google "how to make money video editing"?

It says "promoted", therefore I'm paying for it, presumably. 

In any case, Fiverr shouldn't be advertising my profile (or any seller's profile) when people search google for "how to make money doing x". That's not what any sellers are selling on here. "How to make money" should be a negative key word for any ads Fiverr is running on google (that are targeted to bring traffic to sellers, of course). 

Finally, we 100% need filters on promoted gigs - like any other platform offering paid marketing. We need to be able to select who we want our gigs to be shown to - demographics, geographically, etc. I actively don't want to be contacted by several countries, for example. Is my only option to simply not use promoted gigs, then, since I can't filter those out? Isn't Fiverr losing revenue by not making promoted gigs useful for me, and incentivizing me to actually use them?

Edited September 3 by visualstudios

[Kesha]

On 9/3/2024 at 4:51 PM, visualstudios said:

@Kesha If they aren't considered "promoted gigs", why does the contact say "promoted" in the first message, and is telling me they found my profile through searching on google "how to make money video editing"?

It says "promoted", therefore I'm paying for it, presumably. 

In any case, Fiverr shouldn't be advertising my profile (or any seller's profile) when people search google for "how to make money doing x". That's not what any sellers are selling on here. "How to make money" should be a negative key word for any ads Fiverr is running on google (that are targeted to bring traffic to sellers, of course). 

Finally, we 100% need filters on promoted gigs - like any other platform offering paid marketing. We need to be able to select who we want our gigs to be shown to - demographics, geographically, etc. I actively don't want to be contacted by several countries, for example. Is my only option to simply not use promoted gigs, then, since I can't filter those out? Isn't Fiverr losing revenue by not making promoted gigs useful for me, and incentivizing me to actually use them?

It might that the buyer contacted you through a Promoted Gigs ad, but we never charge sellers for clicks that happen outside of Fiverr.

Also, keep in mind that Fiverr ranks high on Google searches but we are not actively promoting any specific gigs. 

Nonetheless, I hear your concerns about needing more filters, and your feedback has been passed along.