Today Adwords got back saying that they had checked with their "Italian specialist" who insisted that he/she/it was right and that I was wrong. Plus the usual paragraphs of canned stuff.
As it happens, we have one of Italy's biggest law firms on retainer, so I sent the correspondance to our lawyer and asked him to tell me the correct spelling in his own language. He not only confirmed that it was just as I had said all along, but that the Italian embassy in the city in question spelled their location my way, not Googles, and that all official Italian translations from the European Union spells it my way too.
Digging a bit deeper, I found that Google's own automatic translator spells the city in a third and rather unusual way, not the one Adwords claims to be correct.
So, on the basis of this cr*p, I have an important campaign stopped and the only way to get it re-started seems to be to intentionally misspell the headline so that Adwords is happy again.
Does anyone else have experience with this high-handed way of treating good paying customers? And are there in fact human beings somewhere in the system or have I been talking to a machine? It seems to me that Google Adwords is beginning to look more like a government operation every day.
And if that is not bad enough, I wonder how I am ever going to be able to take a day off. Just as you think everything is running smoothly, they come back and tell you that an ad that has been running for a couple of years is incorrect, so the campaign has been shut down. It happens time and time again. I have no one to delegate this kind of stuff to and so have to check my mail several times a day just to be sure that our marketing is still in working order.
After two hours of typing as fast as I could, my fingers were getting sore - plus I was losing valuable CTR history.
I had a brainwave and deleted almost every single campaign right there and then. If the campaign is deleted I figured, Google have a limited desire to screw with it.
The next day I went back and undeleted them, and they've been running just fine ever since.
Now thats not directly related to what happened to you - what happened to you was sheer parochial ignorance of the fact there are local correct spellings, foreign correct spellings and colloquial (or dialect) correct spellings - but I figured I'd post as it might save someone losing years of good CTRs.
866-246-6453.
This would have been far too late. The people on the end of the phone seemed to have no power to stop the idiotic CTR history destruction, or to restore it after the disaster.
866-246-6453
(US)
