11 ms·

My biggest frustration with Google AdWords

224 points by swombat 16y ago

earl 16y ago
To quote myself, yesterday: ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140893 ) It's really easy to get customer service from G. They provide, free, to each customer their famous "fuck off and die while we totally ignore you" brand of customer service that has propelled them to the very bottom of JD Power Customer Service Surveys. Or, you can have a blog with huge reach and bitch on that, whence Matt Cutts will swoop out of the sky to cover up their fuckups. viz slow email and Gabriel Weinberg. So the real question is if you complain on the internet, how many people hear you? Honestly, letting G get their hands on anything that's critical to your life seems an enormous mistake, unless it wouldn't be a big problem for you if your phone stops working. What a perfect example -- Patrick is going for the "have enough readers that G gets embarrassed when you bitch" customer service plan. The only problem is most of us don't have that many readers.
- patio11 16y ago
  I can't disagree. (As a matter of fact, I think my highest voted comment says much the same... ah, here we go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790914 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790914) Strategically speaking, if I were a startup totally dependent on the Googles (I mostly am, but hypothetically speaking), and I knew that having a soap box was the only effective method of conflict resolution with Google, then I would make it a high priority to have a soap box. It certainly isn't the only reason to have a soap box. It isn't nearly the best reason to have a soap box. But you should have a soap box. (Incidentally, it isn't as hard as you think. I know, we have it excessively easy in central Japan thanks to the well-known Ogaki tech mafia and the unending fascination of the tech press with elementary school teaching activities, but even without these huge built-in advantages you could proceed to Plan B and write interesting stuff while trying to help people.)
- mmaunder 16y ago
  Have you considered what Google does with money they save by not employing a team of tens of thousands of customer support personnel? They pass it on to you. In the form of more AdSense earnings, lower cost to advertisers, more money for R&D to improve ad targeting. Of course there's the corporate 767, but that's chump change compared to what they pay publishers each year and how Adwords has enabled small businesses world-wide.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Have you considered what Google does with money they save by not employing a team of tens of thousands of customer support personnel? It makes no difference to me whether they use it to improve AdWords, maintain their 35% margins, buy their own airline, employ brilliant PhDs, give free massages and chocolate icecream to everyone, or underwrite non-profitable products like everything Google does which isn't search/AdSense. All I want is for the thing that I pay money for to work. I'm practically begging for them to take my money.
    - mmaunder 16y ago
      And I'm practically begging them to leave your money on the table so I can get paid more Adsense money and get charged less Adwords money.
      - smanek 16y ago
        The obvious answer is for Google to charge for support plans, like AWS. E.g., $100/month for up to 3 hours of support a month with 4 hour response time, $500/month for up to 10 hrs/month with 15 minute response times, etc.
        scorpion032 16y ago
        They have similar plans in the Enterprise segment. For integrating GMail and Google docs with your website, and for building your own custom apps for the same.
leftnode 16y ago
It also has to do with how much money you give them. I sell firearm accessories. When I launched my site, I put about $300 in my AdWords account and started to advertise for magazines, scopes, handguards, etc. My ads were pulled rather quickly, yet other gun dealers are allowed to advertise: http://www.google.com/search?q=magpul+pmag http://www.google.com/search?q=magpul+pmag http://www.google.com/search?q=rifle+scopes http://www.google.com/search?q=rifle+scopes http://www.google.com/search?q=ar15+handguard http://www.google.com/search?q=ar15+handguard Thats my biggest frustration with AdWords.
- jcampbell1 16y ago
  Yeah, I have heard that 95% of their revenues come from the top 5% of customers. I spend about $10k/month on ads and still get shitty service, and long review times. I do know people that buy $250k+/month, and their ads don't even get reviewed, and they have a personal customer service rep.
  - prawn 16y ago
    At least this gives us all a target - spend more than $250k/month!
    - mikecolella 16y ago
      I have spent 250K+/month for months in a row and received basically the same service as someone spending 5K/month. They assigned me a a personal rep but it's still not possible to get real answers when problems come up. I think the real number to get treated noticeably different is probably closer to 1M/month.
      - prawn 16y ago
        At least that gives us all a revised target! (Holy crap though - I would've thought even $5k/mo got you service and answers. Are the savings really worth the customer dissatisfaction?)
Joakal 16y ago
AdSense has similar customer support issues too. A legal challenge to Google got a near-instant response. [0] [0] http://searchengineland.com/remember-that-adsense-publisher-that-sued-google-won-well-he-lost-20663 http://searchengineland.com/remember-that-adsense-publisher-...
malloreon 16y ago
This isn't a problem unique to small, new, or contentious term advertisers. I've had ads stuck in review for days, and I say this as someone waiting for his google adwords team to arrive and buy him drinks.
tzs 16y ago
I'm not convinced that "Do no evil" applies to Google's handling of advertisers. I've seen it happen that some small company will get its ads banned, and all Google will say is Google isn't sure the company is legitimate. The company makes no headway getting it resolved--until they go hire expensive advertising consultants to manage their Google campaigns, and the consultants have not trouble getting Google to review and reverse the ban within a day or two.
- MediaBehavior 16y ago
  My biggest frustration with Google's motto is that it is not "Do no evil" ...but that it should be. Their motto is "Don't be evil." I'm sure it wasn't an intentional weasel, but it does allow a lot of weasel/wiggle room, as in: I could not in good conscience call the whole outfit 'evil' - but I worry about some of its specific behaviors/policies having evil effects. [/rant]
  - Gibbon 16y ago
    Don't be evil? "Being less bad is not being good." - William McDonough in Cradle to Cradle.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    My biggest frustration is that people care about the motto of a public company. It doesn't matter what the motto is, they're in this to make money. They're not going to turn down billions of dollars because of some nonsense written on a wall.
alain94040 16y ago
Just go to Facebook, their ads work better anyway: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/07/22/facebook-ads-crush-google-adwords-for-the-founder-conference/ http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/07/22/facebook-ads-crush-g... A little bit of competition always helps improve customer service.
- patio11 16y ago
  I have tried advertising on Facebook. If you want, I'll break out my stats and do a blog post about it. Let me spoil the conclusion to that blog post: I got substantially more out of it when I paid them $140 for virtual cowboy goods than when I paid them $140 for ads.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    Agreed. Facebook is where teachers go when they're not thinking about teaching.
damoncali 16y ago
Last time I actually talked to a human at Google, they said you needed to spend $10k per month to get actual customer service... I find my ads get in and out of purgatory much faster than yours - almost always less than 24 hours. Bingo must really freak them out.
- dhimes 16y ago
  There are keyword triggers- you probably avoid them. I know groups whose ads fly in minutes.
acangiano 16y ago
I've said this multiple times before, but it warrants repeating. Customer care is Google's Achilles' heel. I'm mostly OK with them having little support for free products, but when there are thousands of dollars on the line with AdWords or AdSense I expect them to step up their game. I'm convinced that offering prompt customer service for these two services alone would lead them to make far more money than they'd have invested in it. Frustrated customers can become competitors at times. Google has been lucky thanks to its virtual monopoly on search (tough from a technical standpoint) and ads (tough from a business standpoint), but they need to be careful. Technology has a habit of changing things quickly.
- gscott 16y ago
  If it was worth Google's time to provide good customer service they would already be doing so.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    So you are arguing that Google can't improve their service in any way because if there were any improvements to be made they would already have implemented them?
    - gscott 16y ago
      I have given this more thought. If Google had better adwords customer service then some people would have an unfair advantage. Whoever could get the most help out of Google would have the best campaign. So Google runs the Adwords kind of like eBay runs auctions. You can't get extra help from eBay to auction your items better. However, the Adwords system is complicated because unlike eBay where you can easily see what others are doing to compete against you, you have no idea what others on Google are doing to compete against you and you have no idea of why certain things happen.
    - gscott 16y ago
      No I am arguing that if Google wanted to improve their customer service they would have done so and that they don't need to because they have more customers for ad spots then they have ad spots to run. I have tried to get customer service from Google. I spend between $17k to 20k a month on Google adwords campaigns. I have spent a total of $247,907.40 on Google Adwords.
il 16y ago
Surprisingly, Facebook is kicking Google's ass on this. If you spend a decent amount on Facebook, you will get a rep you can email any time and get back a response from a real human. They can expedite the approval of your ads and will even retroactively approve ads that were disapproved by mistake.
- nedwin 16y ago
  And they'll help you do cool things like changing your vanity URL or setting up an account so you can pay via invoice instead of credit card.
- portman 16y ago
  I believe the minimum spend for this service (Account Executive) is $10,000 per month. Google also assigns account managers at similar spending levels. However, I have to agree the Facebook's account managers are far more helpful than Google's. They have more authority to re-approve ads that have been denied, and they seem to understand their own rules better than their counterparts at Google. YMMV.
  - underdown 16y ago
    It's definitely not $10k per month. I spend an order of magnitude more than that and don't have an account exec with Google. The actual phone number for customer support does appear in my account - unfortunately the article we are commenting on neatly sums up my experience with "customer support" as well. If only I could turn an roi with facebook.
    - rfergie 16y ago
      In the UK I think it is about 20k per month
      - axod 16y ago
        Far less. Most I ever spent was around 3k/mo and I had an account exec I could call up on the phone. They were extremely knowledgeable about ad approval, rules, etc They actually also got my account reinstated when google accidentally blocked my whole Google acct. Also never seen an ad under review for more than a couple of hours. The OP experience is an edge case due to gambling etc
rumpelstiltskin 16y ago
Have you tried facebook? 3 yrs ago, when I first started out as an affiliate marketer, 90% of my ad spend was in adwords. At this point, my ad spend has tilted obscenely in facebook's favor over adwords. I remember the hours I used to spend optimising my adwords. But not any more. I spend less than 5% of that time on adwords now. By xmas of this year, it should be down to 0.
hiro23 16y ago
Can't disagree...
Natsu 16y ago
There are several flaws inherent in trying to scale things by having the computer gather all your data from people. Solving them almost invariably requires more people, but some can be avoided if you're more careful about what you measure and how you measure it (i.e. making sure you know what the hell is actually going on, rather than staring at spreadsheets of disembodied numbers removed from any context). * The "best performing" systems are those with the fewest problems, right? But you can get rid of problems in two ways: by solving them, and by making it difficult or impossible for people to complain. * You only hear about problems from the people who complain. Remove their ability to complain (or make it hard for them to reach anyone) and you'll never know about the problems. The tie-in with my first point should be obvious. * A broken complaints system that allows few complaints will "perform better" than any other systems (in terms of having fewer trouble reports that get through) and will get selected for, unless you have people who know what the hell is going on. * When you make people select their problems from a list, you won't get anything not on the list. Sure, maybe you have an "other" field, but sometimes people will just select one of the options even if it's the wrong one. In that vein, your default selection should be some kind of "unknown/other" because unless people make a choice, you can't assume that they intentionally selected anything. I could go on and on, sadly, because I have a lot of experience seeing this sort of thing go on, even though I've done my best to prevent certain industrial QC processes from feeding total and utter garbage data to managers who see the production floor only when giving tours to prospective customers.
dhimes 16y ago
I've also voiced this frustration with Google. I have software which helps middle school kids learn to organize and write essays. I get lumped in with essay farms (thus, requiring review) every fucking time I change one little thing in my ads. I told someone at Google the following (I actually got someone to answer the damn phone- a number that showed up in Google search results for Google's phone number): I shop at a grocery store that allows me to take a hand-held upc scanner and scan and pay for my own groceries on my honor. Occasionallly there is a spot-check: my checkout/payment interaction will halt and someone will come over and scan n items in my bags (0<n<U) and then let me proceed (not sure what happens if they find something I didn't scan in my bags). The longer I shop there without incident, the less frequent my spot-checks seem to be. This is great for all involved. Why can't Google do the same thing? They've reviewed every ad, and after 3 years they've never had a issue. Seems like they should give me the benefit of the doubt and let the ads run (and check on them if they feel the need). I've proved myself and never had an ad rejected. This bothers me so much that I really hate doing business with Google. I've made it a priority to make Google obsolete in my next launch. Well, except that they own everything else on the web, too...
- patio11 16y ago
  I am glad to hear I am not alone here. That "reputation for not screwing us buys you better service" would be nice, and it would scarcely be a first for Google, since it is baked into their Quality Score ratings and spiritually similar to things in core search, too. I can only remember having had a handful of ads disapproved. Most times I just resubmit with something teachery in the ad text.
- bambax 16y ago
  The difference is the risk. If you steal (or "forget" to scan) a pack of noodles then the grocery store loses maybe one dollar. If an inappropriate ad gets through it could (potentially) lead to a major PR disaster for Google. Whereas you being unhappy with the product or the process really makes no difference to Google, since they are the only game in town. (For the record I'm really not "defending" them; I just try to understand their incentives).
robryan 16y ago
Another issue for those that rely on adwords for traffic, in certain countries brands are able to use their trademarks to prevent certain keywords being bid upon at all, for example this recently happened the keyword "chanel". It's possible many would argue that this is fair enough, but what happens when someone gets Google to bad a fairly common work or something the relates directly to another product.
robryan 16y ago
I'm not sure on the any changes to destination url's result in having to be reviewed again. I have frequently modified tracking parameters in the url without incident.
- mceachen 16y ago
  I've seen exactly the opposite. Remember that everything that has destination URLs in AdWords is immutable -- when you edit a keyword's destination URL, or a text ad, you'll see in the URL and in the API that the primary key of the entity is different -- and with every new entity, the google adbot kicks into gear (without any bandwidth throttling decency, btw, so watch out for that, too...)
brc 16y ago
Well I tried running some adwords on the 'display network'. I've tried at various times over the years with this and always abandoned it as a festering pit of spam and fraud. I decided to try it out again, in case things had improved somewhat. And before I knew it, I had a couple of conversions. There was also a lot of 50% CTR rates for obvious spam farm sites. So I excluded all of those and upped the budget. And I got a few more conversions. Some really odd ones too - from myspace.com and other sites that I would think my customers have no business being on (or being on and in a purchasing mood, to be more accurate). But then I compared actual sales with analytics and other information. While my adwords account was reporting 'conversions' my sales were actually not showing these conversions. Now I might have the conversion code wrong (doubtful, it's just a copy/paste) but something tells me varios spammers have worked out ways to make some of your ads show conversions to stop being excluded from the list. Whatever the reason, it's switched off again. Traffic and sales show no ill effects. So I'm back to my original hypotheses : the display network is a festering pit of scammers and money wasting.
- patio11 16y ago
  I was of a similar mind several years ago. Can I suggest that you try Conversion Optimizer? I have my occasional issues with Google, but that product is everything they do right in a little packet of joy with a bow on top. It virtually completely solved my issues with the Content Network. I have end-to-end tracking on my conversions these days and I can verifiably trace ~25% of sales to trials started immediately after a visit from an ad on the Content Network. The network certainly is a hive of scum and villainy, but they give options for not doing much business with that portion of it. P.S. I cannot speak authoritatively for your conversion code, but I'd suspect you're seeing the effects of residual conversions where someone comes in from myspace.com, then later searches via brand name, and you're crediting the brand search but not myspace.
  - ericd 16y ago
    Would you mind sharing some of those options you set to avoid the bad parts? Or does the conversion optimizer handle most of that after a while? If you ever wrote a guide to how to get started with google advertising and get it to work for you, I'd gladly pay cash money for it. There's just way too much noise out there on the subject.
patio11 16y ago
Incidentally, so that I don't earn a reputation as Resident Google Critic: I love Google, I think they've created more value for more people than any company in history, and but for Google I would still be a cog in the machine at a Japanese megacorp. I just don't think they are infallible, and in particular I have learned that their PR is as likely to be accurate as any other megacorp's is.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  For what it's worth, there are several people in Google who will use your article to argue that we could improve our customer service/user support in different ways. I pinged one of them on Twitter and I'll pass this article around within Google. Here's my personal opinion: I think the idea of paid inclusion had a deep influence on Google--we really didn't like the idea of paying to be in Google's index, because it meant that Google's incentives would be misaligned (not indexing pages would lead to revenue). I think that some people might have had the same worries about paid user/customer support (messing things up such that people had to call us would lead to revenue). That might sound crazy, but back in 2000 I saw quite a few companies that almost seemed to make deliberately bad software so that they could overcharge on support contracts. [Of course, there's the notion that Google tries to be scalable as well.] In my personal opinion, if anyone had the notion "we don't want to be paid for support, because that means our incentives are misaligned" in the early days, that notion is outdated and should be re-examined. Just my personal take. I know the teams that support users and advertisers work really hard to scale and that it's a tricky problem.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Thanks Matt. I appreciate that scaling is hard, but I trust you guys to figure a way to do things that are priorities for you.
  - bambax 16y ago
    > I know the teams that support users and advertisers work really hard to scale If the examples given in the original article are true, esp. the fact that when one copies an ad to a different category, without changing anything, the copied ad has to be manually approved again, then it doesn't look like scaling is a concern. But I think part of the problem is that ad-copy approval is a "ACB": ass-covering business. Kind of like the TSA. If something gets through, you need to be able to show that you did anything you could to prevent it, and it's really not your fault. ACBs don't care for efficiency: what they want is documentation.
revorad 16y ago
I hope someone's applying to YC with a customer service startup designed specifically to serve Google's customers. You can guarantee Google won't jump in to compete and if you get traction, they might buy you.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Without a very good connection to google customer service that doesn't stand much chance though, so where are they going to get their access?
revorad 16y ago
Why doesn't Google hire people to fix their existing cash cow product, instead of trying to copy Groupon?
- brownleej 16y ago
  The entire point of trying to copy Groupon is that they want to diversify their revenue stream, rather than relying on a single cash cow. Defending the cash cow at the expense of future growth would be a short-sighted strategy. I agree that they should devote more resources to fixing this problem, but I would rather those resources come from more established underperforming products, rather than new opportunities.
wacheena 16y ago
In general I agree, AdWords (and indeed other Google products) could improve its customer service. But I also know, having worked for several years at Google, that the volume of requests is enormous. Many of them come from advertisers less honest than you, and dealing with them takes time.
jeffreyrusso 16y ago
This leaked data from June 2010 gives some interesting insight into the distribution of AdWords account sizes... http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-advertisers-leaked-document-reveals-advertising-dollars-49918 http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-advertisers-... I work on accounts of varying sizes, approaching $1M/month. At that level, we have access to a handful of dedicated reps who quickly fix issues like this when they arise (in addition to weekly support meetings and a handful of other nice-to-haves.) The smaller accounts I work on barely get any attention, so I can sympathize. That being said, the established accounts I've seen don't have these types of issues. (Even some of the smaller accounts I work on don't run into holdups often at all.) I suspect it has less to do with budget and more to do with some sort of trust built up over time and the frequency with which you make changes to your account (if you make frequent changes without causing problems, you are given more leeway, maybe?) Casual observations on my part, but something I've noticed.
SteveC 16y ago
My biggest frustration with Adwords is trying work out their damn api from the sparse and confusing documentation they provide.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
I really believe this as a result of the engineering culture issue at Google. "There is a solution to the problem of naughty ads, so move on to the next problem." As a product manager, I can think of many ways to improve this process for the people who pay for the Googleplex and, at the same time, decrease the support burden, but those kinds of things are not "fun" engineering tasks, and when engineers get to choose their projects, you better make your project fun. As I'm laying the foundation for my company (with the one engineer I've got working for me) while playing CTO and Product Manager, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about culture and how to build a company that can attract great talent while still getting the really annoying things done that come with polishing a product (something that I don't think Google or Facebook do very well at all). Suggestions welcome. :)
- loewenskind 16y ago
  > build a company that can attract great talent while still getting the really annoying things done that come with polishing a product Pay well. I've seen some really top guys in finance work with some really awful management because the money was just too good to say no to. Until, of course, the bonuses stopped coming in. Then they all left. :)
robryan 16y ago
Another thing which is pretty stupid is the API charges, given that using the API in general would allow people to make more ad spend it just doesn't make sense to me, given the amount of free API's they have.
- dhimes 16y ago
  I'm not familiar with these- but I apologize for the accidental/clumsy downvote from my iPhone. I must have dragged my thumb across the down arrow on my way to the reply button on this app.
mgrouchy 16y ago
So the next step in the approval process(after contacting support) is write a blog post about it? :)
lazyant 16y ago
I'll add my anecdotal case. I created a $30 AdWords campaign last month for the first time ($1/day maximum), more as an experiment and for learning than anything. After a few days I received an email from Google asking "How did we do?". I filled out a form saying I wasn't happy since almost all traffic I was getting was having a 0 second visit time on my site, when the search terms were very specific and matching perfectly with the topic of my web site. It was hard for me to believe that everybody who searched for those terms and click on my add didn't even check any other page so I suspected fraud. A person (it seems; it was signed with a name) answered explaining the situation in a long and informative email, he also ran a fraud report just in case. So in my case AdWords doesn't seem to work out but I got quick and good support from a person at Google when I'm just spending $30 in a "campaign".
joelrunyon 16y ago
Perfect example of why it's always a bad decision to put all your hope in the Google machine. There are lots of other places to do ads (MSN, Facebook, LinkedIn). Use them. Don't be dependent on just one source of traffic.
dabent 16y ago
"I would be strongly tempted to take my business to vibrant competitive offerings. Sadly, Google is pretty much the only game in town" There has to be a way to change that, and it might not be from a direct attack on AdWords, or even PPC.
edash 16y ago
My biggest frustration with Adwords is that when you create a new campaign, Google sets ad serving to "optimize" rather than "rotate." This means Google gradually shows higher performing ads more often, which would appear to be helpful. But they do it before an ad split-test reaches statistical significance (which screws up proper A/B testing). When you copy an existing campaign to create a new one, they even go so far as to switch that setting from "rotate" to "optimize" on the newly created campaign. And with the Desktop Editor there's no interface to change ad serving settings. I'm sure it's profitable for them to have "optimize" set as the default. I just wish they'd allow users who are knowledgeable to select "rotate" without hassle.

224 points by swombat 16y ago

earl 16y ago

To quote myself, yesterday: ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2140893 ) It's really easy to get customer service from G. They provide, free, to each customer their famous "fuck off and die while we totally ignore you" brand of customer service that has propelled them to the very bottom of JD Power Customer Service Surveys. Or, you can have a blog with huge reach and bitch on that, whence Matt Cutts will swoop out of the sky to cover up their fuckups. viz slow email and Gabriel Weinberg. So the real question is if you complain on the internet, how many people hear you? Honestly, letting G get their hands on anything that's critical to your life seems an enormous mistake, unless it wouldn't be a big problem for you if your phone stops working. What a perfect example -- Patrick is going for the "have enough readers that G gets embarrassed when you bitch" customer service plan. The only problem is most of us don't have that many readers.

patio11 16y ago
I can't disagree. (As a matter of fact, I think my highest voted comment says much the same... ah, here we go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790914 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790914) Strategically speaking, if I were a startup totally dependent on the Googles (I mostly am, but hypothetically speaking), and I knew that having a soap box was the only effective method of conflict resolution with Google, then I would make it a high priority to have a soap box. It certainly isn't the only reason to have a soap box. It isn't nearly the best reason to have a soap box. But you should have a soap box. (Incidentally, it isn't as hard as you think. I know, we have it excessively easy in central Japan thanks to the well-known Ogaki tech mafia and the unending fascination of the tech press with elementary school teaching activities, but even without these huge built-in advantages you could proceed to Plan B and write interesting stuff while trying to help people.)
mmaunder 16y ago
Have you considered what Google does with money they save by not employing a team of tens of thousands of customer support personnel? They pass it on to you. In the form of more AdSense earnings, lower cost to advertisers, more money for R&D to improve ad targeting. Of course there's the corporate 767, but that's chump change compared to what they pay publishers each year and how Adwords has enabled small businesses world-wide.
- patio11 16y ago
  Have you considered what Google does with money they save by not employing a team of tens of thousands of customer support personnel? It makes no difference to me whether they use it to improve AdWords, maintain their 35% margins, buy their own airline, employ brilliant PhDs, give free massages and chocolate icecream to everyone, or underwrite non-profitable products like everything Google does which isn't search/AdSense. All I want is for the thing that I pay money for to work. I'm practically begging for them to take my money.
  - mmaunder 16y ago
    And I'm practically begging them to leave your money on the table so I can get paid more Adsense money and get charged less Adwords money.
    - smanek 16y ago
      The obvious answer is for Google to charge for support plans, like AWS. E.g., $100/month for up to 3 hours of support a month with 4 hour response time, $500/month for up to 10 hrs/month with 15 minute response times, etc.
      - scorpion032 16y ago
        They have similar plans in the Enterprise segment. For integrating GMail and Google docs with your website, and for building your own custom apps for the same.

leftnode 16y ago

It also has to do with how much money you give them. I sell firearm accessories. When I launched my site, I put about $300 in my AdWords account and started to advertise for magazines, scopes, handguards, etc. My ads were pulled rather quickly, yet other gun dealers are allowed to advertise: http://www.google.com/search?q=magpul+pmag http://www.google.com/search?q=magpul+pmag http://www.google.com/search?q=rifle+scopes http://www.google.com/search?q=rifle+scopes http://www.google.com/search?q=ar15+handguard http://www.google.com/search?q=ar15+handguard Thats my biggest frustration with AdWords.

jcampbell1 16y ago
Yeah, I have heard that 95% of their revenues come from the top 5% of customers. I spend about $10k/month on ads and still get shitty service, and long review times. I do know people that buy $250k+/month, and their ads don't even get reviewed, and they have a personal customer service rep.
- prawn 16y ago
  At least this gives us all a target - spend more than $250k/month!
  - mikecolella 16y ago
    I have spent 250K+/month for months in a row and received basically the same service as someone spending 5K/month. They assigned me a a personal rep but it's still not possible to get real answers when problems come up. I think the real number to get treated noticeably different is probably closer to 1M/month.
    - prawn 16y ago
      At least that gives us all a revised target! (Holy crap though - I would've thought even $5k/mo got you service and answers. Are the savings really worth the customer dissatisfaction?)

Joakal 16y ago

AdSense has similar customer support issues too. A legal challenge to Google got a near-instant response. [0] [0] http://searchengineland.com/remember-that-adsense-publisher-that-sued-google-won-well-he-lost-20663 http://searchengineland.com/remember-that-adsense-publisher-...

malloreon 16y ago

This isn't a problem unique to small, new, or contentious term advertisers. I've had ads stuck in review for days, and I say this as someone waiting for his google adwords team to arrive and buy him drinks.

tzs 16y ago

I'm not convinced that "Do no evil" applies to Google's handling of advertisers. I've seen it happen that some small company will get its ads banned, and all Google will say is Google isn't sure the company is legitimate. The company makes no headway getting it resolved--until they go hire expensive advertising consultants to manage their Google campaigns, and the consultants have not trouble getting Google to review and reverse the ban within a day or two.

MediaBehavior 16y ago
My biggest frustration with Google's motto is that it is not "Do no evil" ...but that it should be. Their motto is "Don't be evil." I'm sure it wasn't an intentional weasel, but it does allow a lot of weasel/wiggle room, as in: I could not in good conscience call the whole outfit 'evil' - but I worry about some of its specific behaviors/policies having evil effects. [/rant]
- Gibbon 16y ago
  Don't be evil? "Being less bad is not being good." - William McDonough in Cradle to Cradle.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  My biggest frustration is that people care about the motto of a public company. It doesn't matter what the motto is, they're in this to make money. They're not going to turn down billions of dollars because of some nonsense written on a wall.

alain94040 16y ago

Just go to Facebook, their ads work better anyway: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/07/22/facebook-ads-crush-google-adwords-for-the-founder-conference/ http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/07/22/facebook-ads-crush-g... A little bit of competition always helps improve customer service.

patio11 16y ago
I have tried advertising on Facebook. If you want, I'll break out my stats and do a blog post about it. Let me spoil the conclusion to that blog post: I got substantially more out of it when I paid them $140 for virtual cowboy goods than when I paid them $140 for ads.
- dhimes 16y ago
  Agreed. Facebook is where teachers go when they're not thinking about teaching.

damoncali 16y ago

Last time I actually talked to a human at Google, they said you needed to spend $10k per month to get actual customer service... I find my ads get in and out of purgatory much faster than yours - almost always less than 24 hours. Bingo must really freak them out.

dhimes 16y ago
There are keyword triggers- you probably avoid them. I know groups whose ads fly in minutes.

acangiano 16y ago

I've said this multiple times before, but it warrants repeating. Customer care is Google's Achilles' heel. I'm mostly OK with them having little support for free products, but when there are thousands of dollars on the line with AdWords or AdSense I expect them to step up their game. I'm convinced that offering prompt customer service for these two services alone would lead them to make far more money than they'd have invested in it. Frustrated customers can become competitors at times. Google has been lucky thanks to its virtual monopoly on search (tough from a technical standpoint) and ads (tough from a business standpoint), but they need to be careful. Technology has a habit of changing things quickly.

gscott 16y ago
If it was worth Google's time to provide good customer service they would already be doing so.
- arethuza 16y ago
  So you are arguing that Google can't improve their service in any way because if there were any improvements to be made they would already have implemented them?
  - gscott 16y ago
    I have given this more thought. If Google had better adwords customer service then some people would have an unfair advantage. Whoever could get the most help out of Google would have the best campaign. So Google runs the Adwords kind of like eBay runs auctions. You can't get extra help from eBay to auction your items better. However, the Adwords system is complicated because unlike eBay where you can easily see what others are doing to compete against you, you have no idea what others on Google are doing to compete against you and you have no idea of why certain things happen.
  - gscott 16y ago
    No I am arguing that if Google wanted to improve their customer service they would have done so and that they don't need to because they have more customers for ad spots then they have ad spots to run. I have tried to get customer service from Google. I spend between $17k to 20k a month on Google adwords campaigns. I have spent a total of $247,907.40 on Google Adwords.

il 16y ago

Surprisingly, Facebook is kicking Google's ass on this. If you spend a decent amount on Facebook, you will get a rep you can email any time and get back a response from a real human. They can expedite the approval of your ads and will even retroactively approve ads that were disapproved by mistake.

nedwin 16y ago
And they'll help you do cool things like changing your vanity URL or setting up an account so you can pay via invoice instead of credit card.
portman 16y ago
I believe the minimum spend for this service (Account Executive) is $10,000 per month. Google also assigns account managers at similar spending levels. However, I have to agree the Facebook's account managers are far more helpful than Google's. They have more authority to re-approve ads that have been denied, and they seem to understand their own rules better than their counterparts at Google. YMMV.
- underdown 16y ago
  It's definitely not $10k per month. I spend an order of magnitude more than that and don't have an account exec with Google. The actual phone number for customer support does appear in my account - unfortunately the article we are commenting on neatly sums up my experience with "customer support" as well. If only I could turn an roi with facebook.
  - rfergie 16y ago
    In the UK I think it is about 20k per month
    - axod 16y ago
      Far less. Most I ever spent was around 3k/mo and I had an account exec I could call up on the phone. They were extremely knowledgeable about ad approval, rules, etc They actually also got my account reinstated when google accidentally blocked my whole Google acct. Also never seen an ad under review for more than a couple of hours. The OP experience is an edge case due to gambling etc

rumpelstiltskin 16y ago

Have you tried facebook? 3 yrs ago, when I first started out as an affiliate marketer, 90% of my ad spend was in adwords. At this point, my ad spend has tilted obscenely in facebook's favor over adwords. I remember the hours I used to spend optimising my adwords. But not any more. I spend less than 5% of that time on adwords now. By xmas of this year, it should be down to 0.

hiro23 16y ago

Can't disagree...

Natsu 16y ago

There are several flaws inherent in trying to scale things by having the computer gather all your data from people. Solving them almost invariably requires more people, but some can be avoided if you're more careful about what you measure and how you measure it (i.e. making sure you know what the hell is actually going on, rather than staring at spreadsheets of disembodied numbers removed from any context). * The "best performing" systems are those with the fewest problems, right? But you can get rid of problems in two ways: by solving them, and by making it difficult or impossible for people to complain. * You only hear about problems from the people who complain. Remove their ability to complain (or make it hard for them to reach anyone) and you'll never know about the problems. The tie-in with my first point should be obvious. * A broken complaints system that allows few complaints will "perform better" than any other systems (in terms of having fewer trouble reports that get through) and will get selected for, unless you have people who know what the hell is going on. * When you make people select their problems from a list, you won't get anything not on the list. Sure, maybe you have an "other" field, but sometimes people will just select one of the options even if it's the wrong one. In that vein, your default selection should be some kind of "unknown/other" because unless people make a choice, you can't assume that they intentionally selected anything. I could go on and on, sadly, because I have a lot of experience seeing this sort of thing go on, even though I've done my best to prevent certain industrial QC processes from feeding total and utter garbage data to managers who see the production floor only when giving tours to prospective customers.

dhimes 16y ago

I've also voiced this frustration with Google. I have software which helps middle school kids learn to organize and write essays. I get lumped in with essay farms (thus, requiring review) every fucking time I change one little thing in my ads. I told someone at Google the following (I actually got someone to answer the damn phone- a number that showed up in Google search results for Google's phone number): I shop at a grocery store that allows me to take a hand-held upc scanner and scan and pay for my own groceries on my honor. Occasionallly there is a spot-check: my checkout/payment interaction will halt and someone will come over and scan n items in my bags (0<n<U) and then let me proceed (not sure what happens if they find something I didn't scan in my bags). The longer I shop there without incident, the less frequent my spot-checks seem to be. This is great for all involved. Why can't Google do the same thing? They've reviewed every ad, and after 3 years they've never had a issue. Seems like they should give me the benefit of the doubt and let the ads run (and check on them if they feel the need). I've proved myself and never had an ad rejected. This bothers me so much that I really hate doing business with Google. I've made it a priority to make Google obsolete in my next launch. Well, except that they own everything else on the web, too...

patio11 16y ago
I am glad to hear I am not alone here. That "reputation for not screwing us buys you better service" would be nice, and it would scarcely be a first for Google, since it is baked into their Quality Score ratings and spiritually similar to things in core search, too. I can only remember having had a handful of ads disapproved. Most times I just resubmit with something teachery in the ad text.
bambax 16y ago
The difference is the risk. If you steal (or "forget" to scan) a pack of noodles then the grocery store loses maybe one dollar. If an inappropriate ad gets through it could (potentially) lead to a major PR disaster for Google. Whereas you being unhappy with the product or the process really makes no difference to Google, since they are the only game in town. (For the record I'm really not "defending" them; I just try to understand their incentives).

robryan 16y ago

Another issue for those that rely on adwords for traffic, in certain countries brands are able to use their trademarks to prevent certain keywords being bid upon at all, for example this recently happened the keyword "chanel". It's possible many would argue that this is fair enough, but what happens when someone gets Google to bad a fairly common work or something the relates directly to another product.

robryan 16y ago

I'm not sure on the any changes to destination url's result in having to be reviewed again. I have frequently modified tracking parameters in the url without incident.

mceachen 16y ago
I've seen exactly the opposite. Remember that everything that has destination URLs in AdWords is immutable -- when you edit a keyword's destination URL, or a text ad, you'll see in the URL and in the API that the primary key of the entity is different -- and with every new entity, the google adbot kicks into gear (without any bandwidth throttling decency, btw, so watch out for that, too...)

brc 16y ago

Well I tried running some adwords on the 'display network'. I've tried at various times over the years with this and always abandoned it as a festering pit of spam and fraud. I decided to try it out again, in case things had improved somewhat. And before I knew it, I had a couple of conversions. There was also a lot of 50% CTR rates for obvious spam farm sites. So I excluded all of those and upped the budget. And I got a few more conversions. Some really odd ones too - from myspace.com and other sites that I would think my customers have no business being on (or being on and in a purchasing mood, to be more accurate). But then I compared actual sales with analytics and other information. While my adwords account was reporting 'conversions' my sales were actually not showing these conversions. Now I might have the conversion code wrong (doubtful, it's just a copy/paste) but something tells me varios spammers have worked out ways to make some of your ads show conversions to stop being excluded from the list. Whatever the reason, it's switched off again. Traffic and sales show no ill effects. So I'm back to my original hypotheses : the display network is a festering pit of scammers and money wasting.

patio11 16y ago
I was of a similar mind several years ago. Can I suggest that you try Conversion Optimizer? I have my occasional issues with Google, but that product is everything they do right in a little packet of joy with a bow on top. It virtually completely solved my issues with the Content Network. I have end-to-end tracking on my conversions these days and I can verifiably trace ~25% of sales to trials started immediately after a visit from an ad on the Content Network. The network certainly is a hive of scum and villainy, but they give options for not doing much business with that portion of it. P.S. I cannot speak authoritatively for your conversion code, but I'd suspect you're seeing the effects of residual conversions where someone comes in from myspace.com, then later searches via brand name, and you're crediting the brand search but not myspace.
- ericd 16y ago
  Would you mind sharing some of those options you set to avoid the bad parts? Or does the conversion optimizer handle most of that after a while? If you ever wrote a guide to how to get started with google advertising and get it to work for you, I'd gladly pay cash money for it. There's just way too much noise out there on the subject.

patio11 16y ago

Incidentally, so that I don't earn a reputation as Resident Google Critic: I love Google, I think they've created more value for more people than any company in history, and but for Google I would still be a cog in the machine at a Japanese megacorp. I just don't think they are infallible, and in particular I have learned that their PR is as likely to be accurate as any other megacorp's is.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
For what it's worth, there are several people in Google who will use your article to argue that we could improve our customer service/user support in different ways. I pinged one of them on Twitter and I'll pass this article around within Google. Here's my personal opinion: I think the idea of paid inclusion had a deep influence on Google--we really didn't like the idea of paying to be in Google's index, because it meant that Google's incentives would be misaligned (not indexing pages would lead to revenue). I think that some people might have had the same worries about paid user/customer support (messing things up such that people had to call us would lead to revenue). That might sound crazy, but back in 2000 I saw quite a few companies that almost seemed to make deliberately bad software so that they could overcharge on support contracts. [Of course, there's the notion that Google tries to be scalable as well.] In my personal opinion, if anyone had the notion "we don't want to be paid for support, because that means our incentives are misaligned" in the early days, that notion is outdated and should be re-examined. Just my personal take. I know the teams that support users and advertisers work really hard to scale and that it's a tricky problem.
- patio11 16y ago
  Thanks Matt. I appreciate that scaling is hard, but I trust you guys to figure a way to do things that are priorities for you.
- bambax 16y ago
  > I know the teams that support users and advertisers work really hard to scale If the examples given in the original article are true, esp. the fact that when one copies an ad to a different category, without changing anything, the copied ad has to be manually approved again, then it doesn't look like scaling is a concern. But I think part of the problem is that ad-copy approval is a "ACB": ass-covering business. Kind of like the TSA. If something gets through, you need to be able to show that you did anything you could to prevent it, and it's really not your fault. ACBs don't care for efficiency: what they want is documentation.

revorad 16y ago

I hope someone's applying to YC with a customer service startup designed specifically to serve Google's customers. You can guarantee Google won't jump in to compete and if you get traction, they might buy you.

jacquesm 16y ago
Without a very good connection to google customer service that doesn't stand much chance though, so where are they going to get their access?

revorad 16y ago

Why doesn't Google hire people to fix their existing cash cow product, instead of trying to copy Groupon?

brownleej 16y ago
The entire point of trying to copy Groupon is that they want to diversify their revenue stream, rather than relying on a single cash cow. Defending the cash cow at the expense of future growth would be a short-sighted strategy. I agree that they should devote more resources to fixing this problem, but I would rather those resources come from more established underperforming products, rather than new opportunities.

wacheena 16y ago

In general I agree, AdWords (and indeed other Google products) could improve its customer service. But I also know, having worked for several years at Google, that the volume of requests is enormous. Many of them come from advertisers less honest than you, and dealing with them takes time.

jeffreyrusso 16y ago

This leaked data from June 2010 gives some interesting insight into the distribution of AdWords account sizes... http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-advertisers-leaked-document-reveals-advertising-dollars-49918 http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-advertisers-... I work on accounts of varying sizes, approaching $1M/month. At that level, we have access to a handful of dedicated reps who quickly fix issues like this when they arise (in addition to weekly support meetings and a handful of other nice-to-haves.) The smaller accounts I work on barely get any attention, so I can sympathize. That being said, the established accounts I've seen don't have these types of issues. (Even some of the smaller accounts I work on don't run into holdups often at all.) I suspect it has less to do with budget and more to do with some sort of trust built up over time and the frequency with which you make changes to your account (if you make frequent changes without causing problems, you are given more leeway, maybe?) Casual observations on my part, but something I've noticed.

SteveC 16y ago

My biggest frustration with Adwords is trying work out their damn api from the sparse and confusing documentation they provide.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

I really believe this as a result of the engineering culture issue at Google. "There is a solution to the problem of naughty ads, so move on to the next problem." As a product manager, I can think of many ways to improve this process for the people who pay for the Googleplex and, at the same time, decrease the support burden, but those kinds of things are not "fun" engineering tasks, and when engineers get to choose their projects, you better make your project fun. As I'm laying the foundation for my company (with the one engineer I've got working for me) while playing CTO and Product Manager, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about culture and how to build a company that can attract great talent while still getting the really annoying things done that come with polishing a product (something that I don't think Google or Facebook do very well at all). Suggestions welcome. :)

loewenskind 16y ago
> build a company that can attract great talent while still getting the really annoying things done that come with polishing a product Pay well. I've seen some really top guys in finance work with some really awful management because the money was just too good to say no to. Until, of course, the bonuses stopped coming in. Then they all left. :)

robryan 16y ago

Another thing which is pretty stupid is the API charges, given that using the API in general would allow people to make more ad spend it just doesn't make sense to me, given the amount of free API's they have.

dhimes 16y ago
I'm not familiar with these- but I apologize for the accidental/clumsy downvote from my iPhone. I must have dragged my thumb across the down arrow on my way to the reply button on this app.

mgrouchy 16y ago

So the next step in the approval process(after contacting support) is write a blog post about it? :)

lazyant 16y ago

I'll add my anecdotal case. I created a $30 AdWords campaign last month for the first time ($1/day maximum), more as an experiment and for learning than anything. After a few days I received an email from Google asking "How did we do?". I filled out a form saying I wasn't happy since almost all traffic I was getting was having a 0 second visit time on my site, when the search terms were very specific and matching perfectly with the topic of my web site. It was hard for me to believe that everybody who searched for those terms and click on my add didn't even check any other page so I suspected fraud. A person (it seems; it was signed with a name) answered explaining the situation in a long and informative email, he also ran a fraud report just in case. So in my case AdWords doesn't seem to work out but I got quick and good support from a person at Google when I'm just spending $30 in a "campaign".

joelrunyon 16y ago

Perfect example of why it's always a bad decision to put all your hope in the Google machine. There are lots of other places to do ads (MSN, Facebook, LinkedIn). Use them. Don't be dependent on just one source of traffic.

dabent 16y ago

"I would be strongly tempted to take my business to vibrant competitive offerings. Sadly, Google is pretty much the only game in town" There has to be a way to change that, and it might not be from a direct attack on AdWords, or even PPC.

edash 16y ago

My biggest frustration with Adwords is that when you create a new campaign, Google sets ad serving to "optimize" rather than "rotate." This means Google gradually shows higher performing ads more often, which would appear to be helpful. But they do it before an ad split-test reaches statistical significance (which screws up proper A/B testing). When you copy an existing campaign to create a new one, they even go so far as to switch that setting from "rotate" to "optimize" on the newly created campaign. And with the Desktop Editor there's no interface to change ad serving settings. I'm sure it's profitable for them to have "optimize" set as the default. I just wish they'd allow users who are knowledgeable to select "rotate" without hassle.