If you link your Ananlytics and Adwords accounts, Google starts adding an auto tag to the end of your links. This seems ok in theory, but for several hosts, it actually BREAKS your links and sends them to a 404 erro dead page.
This happened to us and we’ve lost thousands of dollars. In the Adwords manager, all links pointed directly to the pages and everything seemed to be working fine. In reality, all of the links from the actual live pages were going to "page not found" error pages. This is particularly troubling, because when I called Google about the issue, they said it was a KNOWN issue. A KNOWN issue and yet we had never been notified. No email, No phone call. Not even a message in our account manager to warn us. Nothing.
For 4 months, all of our traffic has been going to an error page. We were getting ready to drop Google because the conversion rates had gotten so bad (amazingly, we actually still had some conversions). We delved in and started testing everything. Only then did we find that the links in the sponsored results were being sent to errant pages.
They admitted the problem. Admitted that it was a known issue and sent it to billing to take a look at. We've been waiting almost 2 weeks for a response...
Has anyone else dealt with this issue too? I've always had a good experience with G in the past... but this is unforgivable. We deserve a 100% credit, but even if we get a credit... think of all of the lost sales, and think how sloppy this makes our company look. Unreal.
YOU ARE HEREBY WARNED: From now on, make sure to check your links on the actual search results. Sure it's going to cost you to click on your own ads... but it's much less than what it will cost you if all your links are going to dead pages.
Google FAQ here:
[adwords.google.com...]
It's just unreal that they don't even notify you, or post a wanring message in the manager or anything... There's no way to know of the problem unless you do searches for your own keywords and click on your own links. If you do this, you're charging yourself to click over to your own site... so it's couternintuitive. If you click on the feaux ads in your manager, the links work just fine.
Where are you supposed to click on your ad? Of course you wouldn't want to click on your ad in the actual search results... you would click on the ad in your manager where you wouldn't get charged right? The problem is, if you click on your ad in the manager the link still works just fine... so even though you've followed their instructions you still can be getting errant links.
That area needs to be rewritten to say "Click on your live ads in the Google Sponsored links section".. or "Do a search for your keyword on Google and click on your sponsored link". The way it's worded now is not much help....
We're kind of suprised over here. Google is usually pretty good at taking care of their customers. When we brought the problem to their attention, we were told we would have a resolution (credit) within 48 hours. It's been over two weeks and nobody has even tried to reach out to let us know what is going on.
We're a little shocked actually at the lack of service this time around with the big G.
