Google AdWords: Credit Card Declined

Published on January 21st, 2010 by Jeremy Chatfield

A common topic over in the AdWords Help Forum is that of a declined Credit Card. I’ve just had some more approaches from people suffering from this problem and looking for a cure. Someone signs up for AdWords, tries to make a payment and Google fails to take the money. The bank says that the card is fine, and you can use the card elsewhere.

So why doesn’t Google take the money?

Having seen several thousands of these questions, and looked at a handful of accounts with the problem, I have an answer – maybe not *the* answer, but *an* answer. In all the cases that I’ve seen, Google doesn’t want the account to be opened and to advertise.

Why not?

Because the site or the AdWords Account holder is in breach of, or is suspected to be in breach of, one or more of Google’s Terms and Conditions. It may even be offering a scam, such as those that Google is now actively trying to stop.

So far as I can see, the usual reasons for problems are:

• Opening multiple Google Accounts for the same offer (they may be different URLs, but the offer to the consumer is the same or substantially identical)
• Opening multiple Google Accounts to use promotional vouchers – the voucher program is intended to help businesses new to advertisers, not to provide free continuous advertising
• Offering a “dodgy deal” – Google lists a collection of types of offer that it is unlikely to accept, especially the “Google Money” and “Google data entry jobs”, or one that is becoming quite common in approaches to us to help, offering pirated data such as movies and music.

This third item – the “Google Money Tree”/”Google Treasure” type of offer, or knowingly offering material that could be in breach of copyrights, appears to be a common cause for rejection by Google. And the person suffering from the refusal to open an AdWords account is usually certain that the offering is valid – because they’ve bought an eBook at a price anywhere from $9.97 to $997.00 that assures them that other people have made money this way, and it is fool proof, and accepted by Google. It isn’t.

These scams are a pretty fool proof way for the original operator at the top of the pyramid to make money. But if you look carefully at the details, there are usually clues, visible to those who know something about AdWords. The major clues are that very often the scammers will imply that you get paid by Google. They’ll show a cheque *from Google*. If you get a cheque from Google, then that’s probably because you’re running AdSense, not AdWords. Easy for a novice advertiser to confuse those words, but they mean very different things.

AdWords is an advertising system. You pay Google to advertise offers. The offers have to comply with Google’s guidelines. Under AdWords, Google would usually only pay you a fraction of advertising costs, in the event of a few specific problems in the account – and that would usually be in the form of credits against future payments, in the account; not a check in the post, in other words.

AdSense is revenue generation for publishers. You need a lot of visitors, who click on adverts, to make a decent revenue from AdSense. AdSense will pay you, and if you’re good, it will pay you more than it costs to run your site.

If you see a “make money from home”, or a “work for Google” offer, that involves signing up for AdWords, look for signs that the offer is valid. Check the AdWords Editorial Guidelines before you sign up. Be harsh in your assessment of the offer. Don’t be taken in by “special price” offers, by people who show you an AdSense cheque, and especially ask yourself this question:

If this is such a great deal, why isn’t Google already flooded with advertisers who’ve been making money this way?

AdWords has been running in one form or another for about eight years. In that time, Google has seen hundreds of thousands of advertisers. There are people who’ve made money out of selling these pyramid systems. But this is a mature market – the opportunities to make lots of money have largely vanished.

The more advanced scammers know that you know that the easy ways to make money have gone. So they’ll now sell you “secrets and tricks of the AdWords Masters”, to target “massive, low spending keywords” with certainty of making money. Ask yourself why they wouldn’t be doing this for themselves. It isn’t because they are kind and generous. It’s because they make more money by duping the desperate.

Why won’t Google take the money anyway?

A common complaint from those denied the opportunity to advertise, is that Google is turning down their money, and that it’s not up to Google to decide what can and can’t be advertised.

This is a confusion based on the American “right of free speech” and the assumption that Google will find offering deceptive adverts to be in its’ best interests. Let’s look at those…

Deceptive advertising

Google has been successful because it offered high quality search engine results. Users trust the results, sometimes far in excess of the trust they should place. I’ve heard users complaining that a business *should* be selling a product or service, because the business has been accidentally highly ranked by Google for that product or service.

If Google were to destroy that trust, by offering adverts that mislead users, there is a risk that the business will see a downturn in search engine users. The reputation for delivering good results will be damaged, and overall advertising revenues will be affected. Google goes to a lot of effort to make sure that adverts are likely to be well regarded by search engine users.

Right of free speech

You have the right to say what you want in an open forum; within limits.

When you pay for the channel, then the owner of the channel can decide what they want to carry.

Google AdWords is at liberty to turn down your offer of money to carry a message that they don’t want to carry. Just as a newspaper doesn’t have to carry offensive material in an advert – the publisher has the right the choose the content. If you don’t like it, you have the right to advertise using your own system – it just won’t reach the audience that Google has built through its’ choice of what to carry.

Summary

If Google isn’t taking your money, stop worrying about that, and start worrying about the offer you are making. It may be part of some affiliate recruitment scam, or is an overexploited niche or is deceptive to users in some way. It may make the original designer of the scheme richer, but late joiners will suffer.

If you are running a business, make sure you aren’t offering duplicate adverts – trying to bring people to two sites with the same offer is an obvious trick to try, and Google has been handling that problems *for years*. It’s one of the fastest ways to a permanent ban, once they spot it. And it can happen if you’ve instructed an agency and then open your own account (e.g. if you’ve taken on an agency that offers to get you to number one in search results, without disclosing that they are using AdWords to do so).

If you have a real, legitimate business that doesn’t offer stolen copyrighted material or other offensive content, then pay attention to your site. You may be unexpectedly hosting malware, or using words that associate your product with standard online scams. If you can’t work out what the problems might be, then ask an AdWords expert.