While people are trying to understand why they got hit by minimum bids and how they can improve their sites, get some logics and carry on…
… Google AdWords is totally fine with:
- invalid display URLs - [webmasterworld.com...]
- affiliate bridge pages
For two weeks now, I’ve called AdWords four times (and talked to them), and sent one email with the screenshot. They are still “working on it”.
What’s the deal with taking an ad down because it has URL.info or URL.net while it’s pointing to URL.com? If I show that to you, why it’s still there? It is not any kind of specific or complicated case.
Affiliate bridge page – I have nothing against affiliates – company I run does affiliate business.
Yet, the guy is in “approved” area with one page site that has few pictures, two unfinished sentences and 20 or more CJ links that are not even hidden.
So, how about fixing an algorithm for those things?
Other advertisers are paying lot more then they should, only because Google AdWords is not enforcing their policy.
Clicks are expensive enough these days, now we have to pay for those policy violators, too. That has no sense at all.
My question is: Why the existing policy is not being enforced?
Today, I phoned around 6:40pm, and stayed on the phone, waiting until about 6:55, and gave up, figuring nobody would pick the call.
The reason?
At least three ads with invalid display URLs in relation to the same company, on many keywords. In the case of some keywords, it would be four ads in total, of which three would be invalid, 75%.
And, certainly, the top (good/right) one would pay for all of them being there.
In addition, the one I was calling about for last two (getting into third one) weeks – it is still there.
Do we really have to wait until April First? What if we get disappointed and see all of these ads are still there?
How do we resolve those problems? Really?
[adwords.blogspot.com...]
My question is: what about past three years? The policy is actually the same, so why not enforcing it now?
I just hope April First will do something.
Right now I am having 12 new keywords that I am going to phone about, in addition to previous one that hangs in there just fine.
Based on how speedy they are (and willing) I may get this done by next year – or never. What a farse.
I most of the cases, those that you see all the time have not been disapproved at all.
Earlier today, I’ve submitted 12 new keywords and pointed to a guy that I’ve never seen using VALID display URL.
Can you imagine running account(s) with no valid display URL? I can, but cannot imagine how that can go through Google’s system.
The one that is hanging there for more than two weeks now – I asked about it and the nice young lady explained in the way that “if it was violating the policy, it would be taken down”.
Then I asked if that translated meant that actual ad in question was OK, she replied with “privacy related stuff”. Then I said “I did not care about WHO was that”, but if ad was OK or not, she did not answer that one straight.
Then I asked what she would say if I emailed her with exact ad text and display and destination URL and asked for pre-approval – assuming I was one of those that cannot distinguish between display, destination, and landing page URL.
She swung around.
My point was that if the ad was not right, why it was there for more than two weeks, after 4 reports via phone, and one via email.
I am really not trying to emphasize my own problem here, but to share, get others to share, and get attention.
It is obvious that many of us are having huge problems with this.
How much money did go into Google’s bank account, based on “artificially” increased price per click, caused by ads with invalid display URLs?
How much?
Why they don’t have a policy for crediting us back for this?
What is interesting is that other ads (this and other different keywords) have been brought down within 48 hours, but this one… man …it is there in front of their eyes, every AdWords specialist confirms it is wrong, and they are simply not bringing it down.
What's so special about that advertiser? Can I do the same?
Google AdWords is not enforcing its own display URL policy and I, as a customer of Google AdWords, say they are fully responsible for consequences, including increased CPC.
After so many weeks of an increased cost per click (CPC) because of single advertiser that has INVALID ad running all the time, I was forced to stop my ad. Some other will show up, for sure, and that advertiser will suffer as well.
Two options I have:
- Forget about this.
- Create an ad with same invalid display URL and make even bigger mess on Google AdWords, by bidding higher then them.
I’ll see what I am going to do…
It is just so wrong to see THIS particular ad up and running for so long, and get encouraged to even think about doing the same.
What a shame…
I just had a chat with a Google rep about what I reported recently, and he said:
CSR: I can see that the issue that you are referring to has to do with an affiliate program.
CSR: Affiliate programs are allowed under certain circumstances according to our Terms & Conditions.
CSR: In this case, it seems as though this is an allowable case of affiliate.
That's amazing incompetence, Google. Just amazing.
smallcompany, maybe the reason Google hasn't done anything about the violations for weeks is because they don't consider them to be violations. This is the kind of stuff I reported...For one keyphrase:
--Ad in position 2--
display URL: www.exarnple.com (rn instead of m)
landing page: www.example.com
--Ad in position 3--
display URL: www.examp1e.com (number 1 instead of letter l)
landing page: www.example.com
--Ad in position 4--
display URL: www.example.com
landing page: www.example.com
--Ad in position 5--
display URL: www.mysite.com
landing page: www.mysite.com
...and the Google CSR says all of this is allowed and there are no violations!
This is ridiculous.
AdWords is broken. Implementing automatic checking of the display URL is a band-aid solution that fixes the display URL problem (I hope!), but it doesn't fix the people and processes that caused the problem in the first place.
[edited by: Rehan at 4:38 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2008]
Smallcompany, I am not sure if this applies in your case but I had posted several times in the past about hackers (often from China, Turkey and Russia) who sign-up for affiliate accounts and use fake credit cards to get free clicks. The better ones have automatic scripts that regenerate new accounts or possibly even manually set up dozens at a time. Therefore, as soon as one ad gets kicked off they have another one ready to go. Google has struggled to keep these hackers at bay for years (Google has after time won some battles but the war continues). We go through periods of months at a time where we lose traffic, sales and have higher cpc's due to these people.
The simple solution to clean-up AdWords is for Google to higher more people and offer better support hours. It won't clean it up 100% but would make for a huge improvement.
The main issue I have is the disconnect between the Googlers that wrote the policies and those that interpret them and provide customer service.
That’s what I told Mr. CSR yesterday when I called for 7th time to get that particular ad down, and about other site that was nothing else but affiliate bridge page (one page with 35 or more links, no other pages, no full sentence about anything, just click here click there). They seem to be some kind of a buffer zone.
AdWords is broken.
I agree.
The number of cheaters on AdWords is astounding. It's bad enough that we as advertisers have to police the search results but then when illegal ads aren't taken down IMMEDIATELY or worse not taken down for days it becomes infuriating.
Unfortunate true about number of people that should be forbidden to advertise, period. Even more unfortunate that WE, ADVERTISERS, have to POLICE, REPORT, and nothing happens after.
Hey, we (advertisers) do what Google pays their work force for.
hackers
Automated signups should not be too tough to fight. I don’t know much about programming side of that, but I see that image thing (type this here) seems to be doing the job.
Now, if somebody manually signs up for service, and enters stolen credit card info, that’s something that Google has no power over, until it starts being done by repetitive offenders, but still hard to fully stop.
The simple solution to clean-up AdWords is for Google to higher more people and offer better support hours. It won't clean it up 100% but would make for a huge improvement.
Fully agree. It is obvious that Google does not care about case by case stuff. Google AdWords has become notorious about automating stuff to do the job with no human intervention.
Sometimes I have a feeling they leave stuff out there on purpose and wait to see if the system will pick it up.
To round up this, this morning I received an email from famous PM about this new (old) URL policy change.
Basically, one of the biggest PPCers ever, the guy that charges big buck and gets consulted by big companies comments that using various URLs to test is a good thing.
So, according to that email, in the past, people were FINE to do that (bluewidget.com and greenewidget.com pointing to widget.com).
Now, I’ve never been against OWNERS of TM or BRAND to do that themselves. But when that tactics gets employed by thousands of others, including affiliates using non-existing domains, we get into what we are talking about right here in this post, BIG MESS.
He further points to an article written by his fellow BT, where he suggests pointing multiple domain names to same site. I’ve done that in the past and it did work for some time but eventually Google would “kill” one and keep good QS for another one (domain). Not sure if Google is really “smart” to figure that or if it’s coincidence. I had a post about that before:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I wonder if stopzilla got an advice from these guys in the past. ;)
This example adds more to existing mess as it is involving double serving (two unassociated accounts), besides invalid display URL.
When some “small” affiliate sees big legitimate companies doing it in front of everybody, why blame them when they start doing it?
It’s all Google AdWords’ call that they’ve been successfully ignoring for long time.
They seem to be some kind of a buffer zone.
That's why I don't think hiring more people will fix the core problem. They need to hire the right people and train them properly, rather than hiring more of the same.
but they don't seem to understand why the policies are in place
CSRs do not seem to be on the level of their task. The moment when you explain the case, they simply stay silent for a sec and then they say something like “help me understand this better” … like hey.com landing onto hay.com needs to be elaborated. Aaaaarghhhh!
To recall some of my cries here (last year) - the moment when I lost two account reps (senior and day to day) and one or two "optimizers" was the moment when I asked about WHY these things don't get resolved.
Now I talk to Willy, Billy, Milly, Silly and teach them their job, and still don’t get policy enforced.
What I’m wanting to say here is that many of them have a VERY GOOD CONNECTION (mental and physical) with everything internal, but yet, things are not working well.
Now I keep asking for those cases to get escalated to any kind of manager, not just being (re)sent to policy team.
Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist (which I'm not) ... well, it got me out of advertising that item on Yahoo, didn't it?
The people you talk to on the phone are not policy or decision makers.
Normally, it should be 48 hours for straightforward cases, 72 for bit more complicated, and longer for something really complicated.
In my fight over these things, I did get a chance to speak to a policy team member (way back when I had “better” direct support at Google AdWords).
No help - the same policy team member talks the same wording like those CSRs. No head, no tail.
Please note that we all know that CSR cannot resolve our problem directly, and that they pass that over to policy team or whoever.
I've been reporting some double-serving competitors for months, and there they still are.
Why do you think they are still there?
What is not clear is if a tracking URL used as a destination URL that redirects to the TLD of the display URL will trigger this or not. If they do not trigger this, then that is bad news as it means that they are still going to allow exceptions, otherwise why wouldn't they disapprove the ad during creation or immediately afterwards.
I hope that the new (old) policy will help but I have my doubts that people wont easily find a way around it.
I am afraid unless the new April 1st implementation deals with advertisers who change the TLD of keyword level URLs after an ad is approved there is already a way around it. :(
It jumps up several levels, and some weeks or months later, something may or may not get done about it.
You and I can see the obvious policy violations. But for whatever reason, those that are now handling this issue at Google cannot. In Q3 and Q4 2007, they usually disapproved the problem ads within a day. But in 2008, they've not been doing their job.
[edited by: Rehan at 7:34 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2008]
no violations. Case closed
Hmm, never had that one if it was obvious that .net was pointing to .com type or something similar.
I wonder if AdWords’ policy team has been supporting “exceptions” on regular bases (those they’ve mentioned in their public messaging).
That is disastrous… that you, as a regular advertiser, get such response.
For Xth time, I got onto the phone with (another) rep and explained a situation between .COM and .NET, asking him to do a follow up and escalate, as nothing was happening over such a long course of time.
The interesting detail was that he has recognized this as “double serving” while I kept pushing “invalid display URL” idea.
For me, double serving is when ONE advertiser serves two or more ads on the same query at the same time, from two or more unassociated accounts.
Anyhow, since he has recognized this in the way he wanted, and figured that both COM and NET really pointed to the same site, he said they would associate those two URLs and show one only.
For those not knowing about “URL association” – about year and half ago or so, Google AdWords has come up with a good solution for multiple domain names pointing to same content (same sites). If they figure that the two are actually same site, they associate those domain names and treat them as one, no matter what the domain names are.
For example, BLUE.com and GREEN.COM can be treated as one URL, and only one will show at the time.
The end of story, I’ve got my (one) case solved, even though the resolution was not based on what I was referring to.
This tells me that Google AdWords really does not care much about URLs, or… they simply have no full control and not enough people to do it in timely manner and in full. Anyway, this is still a problem that needs more attention.
