For the sake of everything in this world, it is amazing how some Google AdWords’ employee can get it wrong over there.
In addition to this (which is kind of whipping cream on the fruit salad), on the third day of our “journey” customer support lady has asked us if we were phoning about invalid display URL coming from our account?!
I mean… AWA … do you have any kind of internal control which would check on how you handle the cases? Something like those folks coming to check how your finance department works and if you are in line with SOX (Sarbanes Oxley).
Amazing stuff is happening and it only costs Google AdWords’ clients, Google still makes more money. That is not right.
I can't get rid of the feeling that Google as a company is surpringly weak in handling any human contact. They might be geniuses when it comes to coding, but when it comes to real-life customer care (which means, yes, caring about your customer) they are not up to standards.
I had a similar experience with some Adsense folks. They did not even understand the problem that I pointed out and which was CLEARLY unmistakenly on their side. Instead they sent me an unrelated canned answer.
The key message is: you better do not contact Google (which is probably what they want as well).
The key message is: you better do not contact Google (which is probably what they want as well)...
That appears to be all too true. A while back we had an ad disaproved because Google decided it contained a trademarked name. In fact, it was a generic word - "composite" - but it took us a week to convince some number of various unknown people (both by phone and email) that that word, is in fact, not trademarkable. Not that we would get more than 10 hits a month from it, but the whole stupid thing just set me off on a vendetta.
But as Google gets more and more irrelevant to searches we have dropped our ad budget with them by over 30% in the past 3 months, and will probably drop a bunch more next month. When I search for a product, and 9/9 of the ads don't even sell or manufacture that product, Google has a serious problem.
Most of that is being moved to MSN and Yahoo - not as many hits, but far better conversions so far.
[edited by: Wlauzon at 7:45 am (utc) on Aug. 3, 2007]
Unless it's an emergency, it's much more convenient for me to email. However, if I send email to support, nine times out of ten I get a formulaic message back that sounds like it was scripted out of some customer service, and of little or no help at all. We usually end up having to have at the very least half a dozen email exchanges, and I might have to end up calling anyway.
In my experience so far over the last four or so years, Yahoo and MSN are much worse. But it's not a bad / better / best situation, it's more a lesser of three evils.
I've given up on expecting any kind of support from AdSense at all. I imagine they are beleaguered day and night, and my concerns are probably not ever going to be a priority. Only one in three emails there ever even got an acknowledgment.
Customer service is hard (I've been in it in one fashion or another most of my life). When a program or department or company grows really fast, it's easy to let customer service fall by the wayside while building the business up (even with the best intentions of focusing on it *someday* when there's time)
When I think of where Google AdWords was in terms of customer service two or three years ago compared to where they are today, I have to wonder if this is what's going on here.
On that very single keyword, ads with inaccurate display URLs are showing (some were disapproved, some are still there, some new have appeared). So far I think I had 5 people involved (from support). In regards of disapproval of our 100% valid ads, two people, R. and M. have sent me cliché emails about invalid display URLs, bridge pages, framed pages, TM terms, etc. …all what had nothing to do with our ads.
All of our ads were having display URLs that corresponded to destination URLs. We linked directly to the parent company we are affiliated with. Very simple.
So far I recognize two things:
1.They’ve lost control, they cannot do the work that has come their way, they simply have too much on the plate.
2.They don’t want to admit the mistake and say “sorry”.
Honestly… I don’t care much about 2 at this moment. What the whole team is concerned about is the quality of their work which is affecting our business. Our business suffers. How? Well, some of those folks with inaccurate display URLs are bidding very high (on purpose) so nobody can stay there above them.
If this problem does not get fixed – I mean about how Google AdWords’ support works, how fast they are in problem solving, how good understanding of current situation they have, how they handle the case (how many people is involved), how technically they are educated (I had hard time explaining some basic things about copy/paste) – many of us will suffer.
We don’t have enough time to do their work. They are there to support us, it is not that we should support them. Not good, not at all.
Google's concern is that users should never see two ads for the same keywords, going to the same website. If multiple affiliates of the same company do AdWords ads the same way you are describing for yours, duplicate serving would certainly cause your ads to be disapproved, regardless of whether they conform in all other ways.
[edited by: Rehan at 4:44 am (utc) on Aug. 12, 2007]
