Comments on: AdWords Angers Top Contributors

By: charles

charles — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:13:30 +0000

How do you know when a company has a monopoly on a service? When they can offer little to no customer service and there is not much you can do about it. In my feild it is necessary to use Adwords, but THeir customer service is horrible, they refuse to take responsibility for anything, Disclose nothing, and if you ever need a refund forget about it. I was charged 7 dollars for ads out of my area…. Clicks out of my area. I have spent thousands with Adwords and they rufused to credit me 7 bucks.. unreal. Horrible. Cant wait for Microsoft and Yahoo to combine., maybe then we will have a choice.

By: Raph

Raph — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:24:39 +0000

That’s the feeling we have with the Adwords Forum in French. We’re only two TC… and it is not the first time we think about give it up :(.

Do we follow ? I hope so !

Raph (Belgian TC)

By: West Lothian Web Designer

West Lothian Web Designer — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:55:19 +0000

Excellent article, and I hope they pay attention.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Jason

By: Jeremy Chatfield

Jeremy Chatfield — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:29:46 +0000

HI Angela, at 7-8/10 but not showing adverts? Use the AdWords 3 Beta. Select the adverts tab and look at the status. If the adverts are still marked as under review – that’ll be why they don’t run. Otherwise there could be a bunch of reasons – from having too much money to trigger the “suspension” yet too little money to allow a click, through problems with Google Checkout, or violations of the Unacceptable Content Policies. Hard to say more without taking a look.

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:37:51 +0000

Great article. Everything started when they implemented the flawed quality index score. That is when my headaches began. My score was 1 out of 10 an didn’t know what else to do so I switched domains. Now I’m magically 7-8 out of 10 but my ads are still not showing. Something is seriously wrong with the adwords program and I can’t imagine how many millions of dollars they’ve lost in revenue. I just don’t get where the problem is.

By: Holly Blue

Holly Blue — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:44:02 +0000

Wow, too bad I did not know about this before I signed up for Adwords! As a new advertiser, I swallowed the bait hook line and sinker — I thought my ad would immediately start running. Imagine my surprise, now 4 days later, when it has not shown once.

As you mention, there is absolutely no info on why this is the case in the official help files — just a directive to seek answers in the forum. This is a ridiculous disgrace. As you point out, the advertisers are the ones actually forking over (in some cases very large amounts of) cash to Google. We do not deserve this misleading, shoddy treatment. I hope this issue becomes widespread public knowledge. Thank you for your excellent expose.

By: PacificFlix

PacificFlix — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:38:00 +0000

Well that sounds exactly like my problem. So I guess I’ll sit in this “under Review” phantom status until Google gets their act together :(

By: Jeremy Chatfield

Jeremy Chatfield — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:16:06 +0000

The user-to-user forums aren’t supposed to be a replacement for customer service; that was entirely the point of why we took action. Google has been putting customer service teams in place and reducing the number of misleading messages guiding users to the forum.

That’s exactly what my “Weather Report” measures. In the top N questions, how many are about Google Internal Process State and can not be answered by another user.

Questions like “which is the best geotargeting mechanism to use for this case” – that’s fine in user-to-user. But “When will my advert be reviewed” should be a customer service response *and never asked in public – because it is answered in the account*.

There is value in user-to-user, but not as a replacement for customer service – absolutely right.

By: blog456

blog456 — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 06:24:44 +0000

There are so many problems with google ads its not even amusing anymore. How do the company imagine people want to pay for something that is a notorious headache? And their customer support is non-existent and simply horrible. These Member help websites are awful. A company needs a proper support system, not some lame forum where other people who have problems post questions where you have to “hope” sometime in your life you may actually find assistance…

By: Jeremy Chatfield

Jeremy Chatfield — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:41:09 +0000

Hi Phil –

we do have a Google Agency Team – so we have named contacts – email addresses and phone numbers that we contact for problems. Looks like that only gets given to larger agencies. Agency accreditation comes with a sustained managed spend of around $33k/month. I’m not actually sure what the threshold is – we’ve done a lot of work as an “API” agency, where we do all the work primarily via the API/AdWords Editor, and a big name agency collects the account management kudos :)

The AWPs manage multiple forums, are engaged in customer advocacy in-house – they carry messages *into* Google as well as *out* of Google. Incredibly helpful as they are – there are a handful of them and much more than 100,000 advertisers. The forum is not supposed to be Customer Service – that “Contact Us” link is *supposed* to do the job. But it gets broken. Often. But usually only affecting a small segment of users.

I’ll contact you directly. I have an idea. It might not work.