Responding to visitors inquiries re Google AdSense

...without violating the Adsense TOS

[Key_Master]

The AdSense program policy states that sites must respond adequately to support requests and enquiries of their users. I guess my question is, how can I effectively answer AdSense related questions from my visitors without violating the Adsense TOS and without being too impersonal to the visitor?

I would love for AdSenseAdvisor to offer advice on this subject.

[Hobbs]

The exact same way you would respond if they were asking you how much you are personally earning from all your businesses, what software are you using on your web site, how you have achieved a good PR, what are all your sources of traffic .. and all other proprietary information that can be reached independently with some effort but the majority are too lazy to figure them out on their own.
Google provides excellent explanations for what AdSense is and how it works, sending them there should not be a TOS violation.
Actually I am having a similar problem, and maybe I can Hijack your thread :)
I know very well why we are not allowed to draw attention to Ad units and firefox referrals on our pages, but for the life of me I have no idea why Google Referrals is not an exception, if I can promote Google AdSense and Adwords and draw attention to get signups it should be ok, after all we are not getting paid by clicks but by successful money earning signups, right?

[bts111]

I would simply write:

Thank you for your email.

For all information regarding the Google Adsense program please visit www.google.com/adsense/

Regards,
Scared Webmaster :)

Nothing more.

[jetteroheller]

respond adequately to support requests and enquiries

I receive several requests sent by a formular on all my sites a day.

But AdSense was never a theme.

Most requests are "Where can I buy this widget..."

When I write a reportage about XYZ widget producer,
the formular is like this

My name
My address
My telephon
My email

This form will also be sent to

Widget producer
Widget producer address
Widget producer telephon
Widget producer web site

name [_____________]

and so on.

At this system, a major problem had been some very strange email settings at several widget producers.

Several widget producers hat spam filters reacting on

email domain name not equal sending server domain name.

But when somebody fills a form on xyz.com with his email address from hotmail.com, email domain name and sending server are not equal.

So I had to do some extra telephone calls to make shure all the widget producers will also receive the requests generated by my sites.

One of them was really shocked, as he discovered, that there had been a request from a major German distributor to deal with his products in the garbage.

[gendude]

I had some ads show up for a fake product that targeted one of my sites (basically it was a product that didn't exist, but that would have appealed to visitors of my site). Clicking on the link took you to another site that was geared towards passing the users to another site (basically a referral site).

Several users emailed me, I simply said "I've passed your concerns on to Google and I have blocked the offending domain per Google guidelines - I suggest you contact Google about this ad". I wrote an email to Google explaining the situation, that several people were a little ticked and had contacted me (thankfully they weren't ticked at me), and that I felt it was a violation of AdWords/AdSense TOS".

The response I got back was basically "you blocked the domain, which is the proper thing to do". I would like to think they took action, but probably not - they were getting paid by somebody who was referring somebody somewhere else - Google gets their money, the referral site got clicks or views, the site at the end of the chain got visitors.

[Key_Master]

I've got an old site that has a very good reputation in it's niche and a very loyal user base. Many of my visitors have been visiting the site for 5+ years.

I used to sell my own advertising on it but I finally caved into the AdSense thing in an effort to save time (and to get Google to quit cold calling me about it at home, hehe :-)). All in all it has been a success.

However, I get a lot of feedback from my visitors and AdSense related questions pop up fairly often (ironically, a problem I never had when I sold my own space). Some of these questions are submitted privately through E-mail, some in more public forum areas. Like bts111, I've been giving basically canned responses which often times, can be more confusing to the visitor than a more simplified, non-technical response. I guess I'd like to now what the boundaries are in discussing these types of issues- not all of which can be found in the AdSense FAQs.

>>Scared Webmaster :)<<

Not too far off. I don't like walking on egg shells. Who would?