I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

[davidrogers]

I recently had the audacity to complain to the great 'OZ' regarding their systems of support for small advertisers.

As a result someone from behind the curtain decided to go through my campaigns with a fine tooth comb and disapprove a number of my adverts some of which had been going well and getting above 2.0% CTR. Each advert was picked over and I was told where full sentences had not been used, and where my grammar was incorrect and that certain of my landing pages didn't meet with the promotional language used in my advert. Oh if I only had a brain.

Your right this took someone some time to do but all of course in the hope of sending me down the yellow road to enlightenment, nothing to do with my daring to question the great OZ of course.

As the new wicked witch of the west I felt compelled to search out other evil doers in the hope that my awfulness was not mine alone. Nearly every single search term I used returned adverts which would fail the criteria applied so rigorously to mine.

Does this mean a new era of Google enforcing their own advertising guidelines. If it did, my search would estimate that between 15 and 25% of current advertisers
some household names would have their adverts disapproved.
I doubt however the great 'OZ' would welcome such a hit on his ad revenues.

So we're not in Kansas anymore and there won't be a happy ending for munchkin land, do you want fries with that just built a car park on it.

[johannes]

I have noticed that their strictness varies very much. I think it depends on which spell-and-grammar-checker that goes over the ads. Sometimes your lucky.

I can't beleive they started to check your ads just cause you complained a bit. How rude of them!

[Marcia]

That may not have been the reason, because of complaining, but what if they sent it up a notch in the editing pecking order? That wouldn't be unusual in a support situation, and sometimes they're more finicky further up in any organization.

It may have gone further on up the yellow brick road to the Wizard for editing. ;)

[vibgyor79]

No Marcia. These Google adwords people are extremely vindictive. I bet they are throwing darts at davidrogers' photo in the main reception hall ;)

[hannamyluv]

I have found that if through random checking, they find one ad that has "errors", they will take a good deep look at the rest. I think the mentality is that if one is not meeting guidlines, more of them probably aren't.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

If your conversation with customer support revolved around the possibility of ads having been disapproved in error, then it would not be unusual for a senior person to be asked to review all ads, for consistency - just as Marcia (and hannamyluv) suggest.

It also seems worth saying that it is in everyone's best interest to keep your ads running, so long as they are within the Editorial Guidelines.

[fenway]

johannes...i've observed the same. It varies greatly. I think this may have to do with the fact that these programs are growing quickly and there may be many newer editors.(have you searched Google on jobsites, their hiring these guys left and right)

I've also found that the more money an account is spending, the more flexible they seem to be. I've also had instances where a Google creative maximizer has provided creative for us, after I entered it into the tool on my end, it was then denied by another Google editor.