Email support useless?

[Sunflux]

Over a month ago I had an issue with a blank ad being served by AdSense. I determined that it was a particular CPM ad from a particular large computer retailer that had been set up incorrectly and was serving blanks at an almost complete fill rate on my site over a weekend. There was nothing wrong with my site or the AdSense code; it was just a bad campaign.

So I sent an report off to AdSense support through the official form with as much detail as I could - I included all my AdSense account details, the AdSense code that was calling the ad, all of the details of what WAS being served (a 1x1 pixel GIF), the click-through URL (which is how I determined who it was going to) and so forth. Piece of cake to nail it down.

The problem ad started being served on a Friday, I reported it on Sunday, and it was fixed sometime on Monday. I never heard back, but since it was fixed I had no reason to be concerned.

Today I received a response to that email... 42 days later. And the response was from the AdWords team telling me how they can't answer questions on AdSense. Looking at the original form submission details, my report was CLEARLY sent to the AdSense team, but here I get the wrong team answering back 42 days later, telling me they can't help.

What exactly is going on over at Google? Internal email misdirection and 42 day response times? Why even bother?

Throughout this I've also been trying to deal with a problem with ads that aren't serving on my site, which I have tracked down (with a 100% certainty) to an issue with a particular keyword in URLs that is blocking ads (the keyword is NOT BAD but is a product name that, when run together without spaces, results in a bizarre dictionary-based trigger). After some initial progress made with the issue (now about 50% of the troublesome pages will serve ads) I haven't heard back in some time. And now I think I know why - in 40 days I'll hear back from some completely unrelated department on how they can't answer my question!

[edited by: Sunflux at 5:02 am (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]

[zett]

Email support useless?

Not just useless, but risky.

You don't want to interact with (censored) people like this. I experienced a similar issue, not with the campaign side of things, in the past. The Adsense system was reporting bad numbers for certain ad types.

They came back with a letter explaining that they'd take care of invalid clicks, and if they found invalid clicks on my account they'd terminate the account to protect the advertisers. As you can guess, I was deeply scared. I had clearly explained the problem to them, but they mis-interpreted the mail (if they read it at all).

Never interact with Google unless you absolutely have to.

[Shimrit]

They are beyond useless. I had a problem with their system myself (that I wrote about here)and after 2 weeks of automated email hell, they basically told me I'd need to open a new account and will have lost all the money I'd made up to that point.

[Lexur]

You better fly under the radar and, even more, never (I SAID NEVER) try to reply anyway anytime to any email with a soft machine-generated taste (optimization tips and so on). Maybe you (like me) think about Google as a building full of smart engineers but the sales team/reps seem to be in the building beyond the yard.