Google AdSense Support 2.0

The Human Touch is Missing. It's a Low Priority Issue

[varun21]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4547480.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 7:20 am on Feb 22, 2013 (utc -8)

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I was making about $600 monthly. And I was using it (AdSense) on two sites. Got busy and traffic dropped on one. Else I had 2k+ uniques (both sites combined). But that doesn't matter now.

I find there's something inexplicably wrong with AdSense support. They want to support publishers yet they don't want to communicate with them. It's a low priority issue. I wonder what kind of support they offer to adword advertisers.

Since I got a payout regularly, I was eligible for email support. Now after being blocked, I'm just in the long crowed queue. The human touch is missing. It's just the money, else who would like to work with a support/program like theirs. Take the money out of equation and do the math.

[martinibuster]

On December 5th, 2012, a little over two months ago, in an official Google blog post titled, Working better together: Protecting against invalid activity [adsense.blogspot.com], Google promised to consider tenure, offer more tools to provide appeals, and to provide more details on invalid click activity.

Has Google AdSense Support improved?

We are considering tenure more actively when responding to detected invalid activity. For example, some trusted publishers will now have their accounts suspended instead of terminated, and over time we hope to work directly with more publishers to resolve invalid traffic issues without needing to disable the account at all. (As always, we’ll continue to credit advertisers for any invalid activity.)

We’ve given publishers tools to submit more informative appeals via a new form, which may help resolve issues more quickly.

We’re providing more details on invalid activity’s causes. If we’ve detected a violation of our policies you’ll receive an email and a notification to your account with further information and instructions.

Just a month ago at the Learn with Google event in Manhattan I heard publishers telling Google that they were willing to pay for support, one publisher saying he would gladly pay $100 for it, just to be able to talk to a human. It's been almost two months now. Has anything changed?

[netmeg]

For what it's worth, when I've contacted support (since they made that change) I've gotten real live human (sympathetic) and (mostly) helpful support.

At the base of it though - read the Google book by Steven Levy. Google doesn't really believe in support, they don't think it scales. That's why they spent so much time driving us to forums; but that didn't work because the forums got overrun with people asking why they got kicked out.

Google believes in stuff that scales. To them, giving us the support they do is a pretty big concession (and it's not a lot better on the AdWords side - and we're PAYING for that - but it is a bit better) Individually, we don't exist.

Yea, it's a PITA. But it's also the product they offer, and unfortunately there's not a lot of incentive for them to improve it.

[freitasm]

I actually stopped using Google Apps enterprise when I opened a ticket with a valid PIN and the human support replied "asked in the forums".

I then moved my business to Microsoft Office 365 (back then BPOS) and the three times I contacted them in the last three years I got a human reply in all of them and a phone call in one.

In other words: do not trust that you're going to get support from Google. It's great to have their tools (I use AdSense, Analytics, Webmasters, Gmail and a variety of others). But it's not "free", they actually make money on that anyway, so it works for both of us. But when it came to supporting businesses with some level of requirements that fell apart...