The AdWords Help Forum has degenerated over the last year or so, into a customer service forum. I intend to cover that in detail some other time. The common signatures of pain in the forum are:
- Complaints that “Google won’t accept my Credit Card“
- Making promo vouchers work
- Suspension for various reasons, often involving guaranteed ways to make money from home, as an affiliate
By and large these users have been cut loose from Google Customer Service. The users have been sent through an automated path to the forum, rather than given human customer service. The causes of this bulk of visitors are, I think, complex, but Google appears at least partly complicit in its’ own generation of clients that it would prefer it didn’t have.
Look at this chain of events for example…
I spotted a mention of a previous Merjis article on another blog. The entire article had been scraped, along with many other sites’ content, to help that blog rank well on searches involving making money from home.
The site was monetised with AdSense adverts for a well known affiliate recruiter. So, first question: knowing that this advertiser will be promoting affiliates, very few of whom have a satisfactory experience to judge from the AdWords Help Forum, why is the advertising permitted either by AdWords or by AdSense?
Clicking on the AdSense advert takes the user to the affiliate recruitment site. They’ve avoided the landing page popup problem, by offering a JavaScript in-page popup to collect email addresses and names. A clever way to avoid the old problems of the classic affiliate squeeze page being given a low landing page quality score.
The popup is the main lead generator – because it makes a free offer that you receive in email. So the offer is invisible to Google bots – they’d have to complete a form, which, by convention, bots aren’t supposed to do (form filling could take actions on sites, like deleting postings, or ordering stuff, etc). And after that, the bot would have to read the email to understand the offer… which is usually delivered on another website.
So you arrive via the email cutout on a third site (the first is the blog-scraper with AdSense but no direct ties to AdWords, the second has no direct AdSense or AdWords connection, and the third site is the one with the sales proposition). The third site reveals that you make money by… signing up for AdWords. And Google will give you a promotional voucher for signing up for hosting via a third party. So, for that matter, will Yahoo, for this most recent “promotion”.
The series of cutouts in this chain makes it harder to detect. But the user still perceives the offer as validated by the major search marketing programs. The organic ranking, the promo vouchers, the AdSense adverts all combine to put the Google brand into the frame for the affiliate recruiter. Not quite as good as endorsement, but imagine how much harder it would be to convince people, if the AdSense adverts and Google comarketing weren’t available?
So Google indirectly pays the affiliate recruiter for running scraper sites, subsidising their costs of advertising, then offers a promo voucher via third party arrangement, which validates the shabby offering, that will recruit people who turn up in the AdWords Help Forum, desperate to make money from home with no knowledge. The volume of people turning up with problems is too high for Google to bother offering Customer Service… and it’s a lot of self inflicted woundings.
You could say that these users should be careful. That it is their responsibility to watch out for what they buy into. I could counter with the notion that providing payments and promotions to organisations that lead to a poor customer service experience appears to be something Google won’t tolerate in other advertisers… but it is OK for Google to do? Why?
Why am I writing about this? I used to enjoy working out small customer problems in the forum. It helped my troubleshooting skills. I could detect emerging problems more quickly. The current forum is useless for that. It’s just a place for people who should never have been recruited by Google, to get free customer service because Google isn’t willing to spend time on them. The mechanism of requiring a public posting decreases the volume of queries, as well as decreasing the value of the forum as a publicly accessible forum.
When we’re looking at social media, the misusage of the AdWords Help Forum as a public customer service forum suggests that there are some deep problems inside Google’s understanding of social media and the implicit and explicit contracts. But that’s another article for another day… In the interim, think of this as the other side of yesterday’s article about PC World and their soft paywall – where PC World made the barrier to interaction too high for me, Google has made almost frictionless something that probably shouldn’t be exposed in public.
TAZook wrote,
I sympathize with your position. I haven’t been frequenting the forum for long but I’ve certainly noticed the increase in complaints around people who are involved in Get Rich Quick schemes.
However, to my mind, blaming Google for these dishonest schemes is like blaming the phone company because a dishonest telemarketer called you and led you to fall for a scam.
I’m a big believer in personal responsibility. The people falling for these scams without doing any research to figure out how legit the offers are can’t blame anyone but themselves.
If they have complaints, they need to take them to the companies that sold them the scheme, not to Google. I wish they didn’t wind up at the forum, but I can’t honestly say I think it’s Google’s responsibility to offer them customer support.
As far as the other issues–credit card failures and promo voucher problems, I suspect that the percentage of people having problems is small in comparison to the number of people submitting credit cards or receiving vouchers each day.
Theresa
Link | February 6th, 2010 at 12:16 am
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Hi Theresa, nice to see you here!
I’m not blaming Google for the schemes. I’m saying that the situation in the AdWords Help Forum is that it can no longer be an effective user to user help forum. And amongst the reasons is that Google is itself working hard to recruit advertisers that it would rather not service. You don’t think that’s a bit, well, counterproductive?
It’s *Google* that is supposed to be turning off the Google Money/Cash/Treasure accounts that it doesn’t want. But drop in a cutout or two and, hey, there’s Google subsidised advertising and Google co-marketing vouchers. Join the dots. You want to deliver better customer service, and have a better reputation? Then stop recruiting people you’ll disappoint. Seems pretty easy. If you’re recruiting too many of the wrong prospects, stop recruiting them.
In this article, I’m not defending the people who fall for these scams. I am suggesting that when Google lends its name and reputation implicitly to these scams, it causes brand damage and a poor customer experience. And that’s probably not a good idea, except in the very short term. (And by short term, I mean “as long as it takes to discover that you are subsidising people you will inevitably later ban”).
Clearer? :)
Link | February 6th, 2010 at 12:48 am
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Ah. I see your problem now. Or my problem, through another pair of spectacles. Because of my experience of the AdWords Help Forum over the last year, *my* perception of Google is that it has a lot of unhappy small clients, who have not received any perceptible customer service, other than being sent to a forum, nominally for other users to help. IOW, Google ducks the responsibility of dealing with these suspended accounts.
Well, if Google doesn’t want them as clients, why does it expend so much effort in helping affiliate recruitment scammers to sign up users it doesn’t want? It’s just a recipe for pain.
Link | February 6th, 2010 at 1:12 am