On march 20th (saturday) all my campaigns that were running for 7 months suddenly stopped showing without any given reason. I immediately emailed the support.
On monday afternoon they replied telling me that my campaigns got disapproved because from my landingpage I link to a (sponsor) site and on this site they found a link to a dialer below the join form. They said that they had just updated their policy and that it's not allowed anymore to link to sites that are associated with dialers in any way. And if I submit an ad again that is associated with a dialer they will close my account.
This rule was so new that at this time their editorial guidelines hasn't reflected this updated policy, a link to a dialer was still allowed based on the editorial guidelines. They changed their guidelines some times later.
The problem is that this additional payment option via dialer is on nearly every adult (sponsor) site out there, it's a very basic feature on adult sites for surfers without credit cards. So as an affiliate there are nearly no options left to advertise a sponsor site, cause nearly all of them have this dialer link on the join page.
I was very lucky when I found one sponsor who present this dialer link only to foreign visitors from outside the USA, all USA residents didn't get this dialer link presented (it's handled on an ip to country basis, the same system adwords is using for their country targeting).
I quickly set up 5 new campaigns for this sponsor, all campaigns were targeted to the USA only so that these ads were 100% dialer free for the visitors coming from google. But the campaigns didn't got any impression at all, they were stopped right away from the start. So I emailed the support again asking whats wrong.
Some days later I got a reply telling me that the campaigns are disapproved because there is a link to a dialer on the join page. Within 5 minutes I emailed them back that only the reviewers can see this dialer link because they are visiting/reviewing this site from the UK, but the campaigns are targeted only to the USA and these visitors will not get any dialer link.
But nothing happened, they simply have not responded to that. I've sent this some more times, tried to explain it with different words but nada.
Now yesterday I got an email from them telling me that because of these ads my entire account is now closed. I had violated their terms for the second time = account closed. But I have not, my ads are 100% dialer free!
Brief description:
8 weeks ago google decided to disallow ads that are associated with dialers.
My ads in question are 100% dialer free for google's visitors because the sponsor sites that I advertise offer this dialer only to foreign visitors who are visiting from outside of the USA based on ip/country detection. My campaigns are targeted to the USA only and US residents will not get presented this dialer link. But adwords reviewers are reviewing my ads from the UK and that's why they will get this dialer link and they have disapproved all of my ads for this dialer link (which real visitors coming from google will not see cause they're visiting from within the USA). Even my entire account is now closed because of this. But my ads are really dialer free for the visitors who are coming from google!
On the other side there are still hundreds of adwords ads running on google from other advertisers that have this dialer link presented on their join page to ALL visitors coming from google (and yes I mean adwords ads on the right side). These ads are in every adult niche. Still 5 out of 8 ads that are shown for a query have this dialer link.
So google tries to get rid of ads with dialers, I understand and respect this. But they disapproved my ads that are really 100% dialer free while hundreds of other ads that have this dialer link are running on google without any interruption for the last 8 weeks.
I don't understand this anymore. I play by the rules and get penalized for it.
Fact is, if the US team would still review my campaigns they had seen that my ads are 100% dialer free and my ads would run since two weeks.
What do you think? Was the disapproval of my ads right or not? Any opinion would help me in trying to understand this.
Tell them you are willing to do whatever it takes to get this account online.
They are trying to make money. If you wave money in their face and meet their guidelines I'm sure they'll reopen your account.
Correct call, IMHO.
Google can't predict if you'll (the sponsor site) change the targetted countries tomorrow, so if your site only presents a dialler to Outer Mongolia today, it is considered as having a dialler.
That reminds me that sometime ago I clicked on an adwords ad which has installed a bunch of spyware, adware, a search engine toolbar and also repeating popups on my pc. Very possible that this was all targeted to all countries except where the reviewers were coming from. Otherwise they would have noticed this. I've had to install my PC completely new after this experience.
any such issues should be taken up with Google.
Shak
While I sympathize with the webmaster who has lost a major source of income, I also understand and fully support Google in their decision.
I've been reverse engineering some internet malware for a couple of days now. It is my opinion that the dialer technology, while being a perfectly valid billing method, is being relentlessly abused. I intentionally downloaded a dialer from a porn site into a virtual machine; it installed along with itself a "helpful" internet explorer toolbar, a "helpful" piece of malware to show me ads when I don't want them, and had a "helpful" self-update function.
The dialer technology is mostly used by web sites with less than serious concern for privacy of their users. It isin essence globally evil and Google discouraging promotion of dialer-based websites, while perhaps being unfair to the particular author of this particular thread, is being generally fair to the Internet, and I commend them for that.
