Looks like Google may be taking action against another class of advertiser who delivers a poor experience of search. The AdWords Help Forum is showing signs that a number of advertisers, who have run multiyear accounts, are unable to improve their Quality Score from a measly 1/10 and are seeing no impressions. It also appears that a few legitimate advertisers, not engaged in the activities now proscribed in the Unacceptable Content policies, are being affected too.
The symptoms? You get a visit from the AdsBot, and shortly afterwards, a QS previously of 7, 8, 9 out 10 drops to 1/10 on the grounds that the landing page is responsible. Check the Unacceptable Content Policy. If you definitely aren’t included, then seek help to recover the account. If you do things that breach policy, then it’s time to change your model or your advertising system, as it is going to be rocky for a while.
Tim Scott wrote,
Great article, but I’d like to comment on some recent updates from the last slap.
1.) Landing pages are out for good, they have been shutting down anyone with a bridge or landing page.
2.) If you do get shut down, there is little hope of geting back on. Even Perry Marshall is clueless on what to do.
I think the best thing to do now is just, migrate towards Bing and Yahoo for now, untill this whole Google slap smackdown blows over, just IMO.
Link | December 14th, 2009 at 3:41 am
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Hi Tim, Google make mistakes; some plausible advertisers are refused access when automation mistakenly assesses them as bad. It is possible to recover these accounts.
Affiliates? Personally, I like the super affiliates and loathe the affiliate recruiters. It is still possible to be a good and effective affiliate - but you need to be selling something that doesn’t damage the buyer.
In my experience on the AdWords Help Forum, too many “affiliates” sell “information products” that turn out to be PDFs telling users how to make money selling information products. I have little patience or empathy for the problems of those “affiliates”, and my main suggestion to them is “find something that helps someone, rather than rips them off”. I’m not fond of Ponzi and near-Ponzi schemes. YMMV.
Even if I knew a way to make those work, I wouldn’t share it. But it is definitely possible to recover legitimate accounts for real products and services that get accidentally caught in the cross fire. However, with the downgrading of customer service at Google, you’ll probably need someone with contacts at Google to resolve the issues.
Link | December 18th, 2009 at 2:23 pm