This time I got a personalized response that explained that they would be happy to let our ads run but I had to remove the words "smoking" and now "knives" from the landing page, and "remove the ability to search your sites for those listings"
Well, this is ridiculous. Who's the biggest AdWords customer? My guess is Ebay. Think you can buy a bong or a knife on Ebay (or in Amazon's zshops?)? Well, you can. It's even more ridiculous when you consider that the Google Directory lists some of my sellers in both their Recreation/Tobacco category and their Recreation/Knives category. Even More ridiculous is the fact that websites we identify as direct competitors, already have ads running in the same keyword range and they list both Knives and Smoking and Tobacco on their "landing page" right now. My guess is that they haven't modified their ads since this policy change--I know it's a policy change because one of these campaigns ran without a hitch previous to my keyword refinement.
sorry for the length of this post but I'm curious if anyone else has run into these sort of problems. I get really worried when a marketing force as powerful as Google singles anyone out this way. I don't believe I can effectively compete for new business without Google, and reading these forums tells me that most of this audience feels the same way. All advice appreciated.
The folks at Google have decide to make the web a better place (according to them-god help us all), matters not if what your selling is legal or not - matters if Google don’t like it.
I have one ad that I swear the comp. keeps an eagle's eye on me and goes running to Mamma Google as soon as I even toe the line.
Lawyers call that "restraint of trade"
What you might also find is that this may well be to do with the syndicated partners and their insistence on Google satisfying more stringent standards rather than Google's doing. Have you tried running the ads with syndication turned off to see if you get any joy?
When there is always this threat of "will they renew with us" looming over them they can't just take a stance that they like, you can bet the hoop jumping for the AOL account for example would be phenomenal but based on the audience size you'd go through them right?
I questioned them but they decided to uphold their guidlines. I annoyed as I set this up as a favour to a client to boost their sales before Christmas. Now that plan has gone down the gurgler...
Sure it's annoying that Google has some inflexible rules about certain banned items. If you're trying to hawk jewelry and you have knives anywhere on your landing page, it's against their rules, unfortunately. Knives of any type are banned. Just so you know, they also don't like Ninja throwing stars. :)
It is probably not too big a stretch to suggest that a few of these banned items come straight from the personal philosophies of Google's founders. I'm sure their lawyers have also weighed in and advised them to be careful on some types of products - perhaps an excess of caution, but that's the advertising business.
The solution is really quite simple, though. Change your landing page. Problem solved. You can say "but I still don't think it's fair..." and write 50 more posts on it, but some of this stuff just isn't likely to change.
As for the cream liqueur case, I have trouble believing that this is an insurmountable problem. Google have been known to make mistakes and their overworked editorial staff may not be able to respond as quickly as they should, but consider where we were 10 short months ago (there was no such thing as pay-per-click advertising on Google). Without seeing your case it's tough to comment, but again, Google is not in the business of turning away legitimate business - just enforcing a series of rules presumably for the benefit of all advertisers. Most of the rules make sense. Some benefit Google more than they benefit us. Some of the rules are flexible. Some aren't. By all means appeal or ask for a clarification - politely and coherently - and I doubt you'll have a problem advertising cream liqueurs.
They did very kindly reverse another decision on the use of superlatives that I questioned.
You win some, you lose some.
ps: i'm not going to change my landing page because Google says so. AdWords isn't such a vital tool that I can't compensate with other means.
Does anyone know if the same terms that AdWords finds objectionable penalize me in search results on Google. I realize that search and adwords are handled separately, but I'm curious if the appearance of "objectionable" words will negatively influence my ranking for searches on "non-objectionable" keywords?
What if I run a bidsite and all of a sudden a rare knife from King Arthur showed up and the bidding gets exciting and it's running for weeks as number 1 or best buy.
Will Google ban me for that? Where do we position ourself here? If webmasters should be 100% round the clock watching the website and adjusting the AdWords accordingly he will not have anything better to do! What a waste of company resource.
Should we hire somebody who will only be responsible for AdWords and call him AdWords Technical Engineer or "A Clerk" where "A" has a special meaning.
I'm so confused about this program... *REALLY*
