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When I ran a brick and mortar business, we ran Google Ads to get bookings, and we could always tell when our ads weren't running, met their budget, or were not
by dpcan 7y ago
When I ran a brick and mortar business, we ran Google Ads to get bookings, and we could always tell when our ads weren't running, met their budget, or were not running for some reason because our bookings would effectively drop to zero since 2 other companies had better organic SEO than us.
THEN, one of our other competitors started outspending us a bit in Adwords. It hurt, but wasn't the end of the world because we could afford to spend just a little more.
However, it seems that as soon as we went over a certain amount, our budgets started getting exceeded by about 10am in the morning.
But our competitors ads kept going.
We contacted Google to find out what was going on. None of these clicks were even resulting in business, contacts, nothing. So we assumed the worst, our competitor was having someone click all our ads.
This process started the downward spiral for our business. Not being able to stay live in Adwords long enough to get any new business was devastating and I sure as heck wasn't going to participate in clicking on my competitors ads because that's fraud as far as I know. SO, we just suffered and I couldn't get any support from Google.
In other news, the business has been closed for a year and Bing still lists it as open with photos, etc. We've tried marking it closed OVER AND OVER again and nothing is changing. We finally got on the phone to them and they actually said they can't change the search results. It's irritating to see a year old business open on Bing that's closed everywhere else.
- Gibbon1 7y agoThis brings up an unsatisfying conversation I had with an ex google person. I've worked in the embedded/industrial side of tech for most of my career. And the ratio of customer support vs the amount of money google is charging is utterly shit from my perspective. My friend tried to explain why it needs to be shit for vague security reasons but I'm unconvinced. Company collects thousands of dollars from customers and can't be bothered to give them a phone call when something goes sideways? Give me a break.
- franczesko 7y agoGoogle support is non-existent. One of the reasons, why I stay away from Google Cloud.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoNot true... you just have to pay for it. I worked for A fortune 100 company that was moving some things to Google App Engine, and paid for the highest level of support. We had a list of guys we could get on the phone whenever we needed, including the main guy in charge of everything. I helped them fix a lot of bugs and broken processes, but I'm better than most at making reports. If they had to deal with bad developers blaming Google for problems that had nothing to do with Google, that would waste a lot of time. But on the other hand, if we didn't pay for support, those problems probably never would have been fixed, and I don't think we were ever compensated or given discount support for helping.
- TheKarateKid 7y agoI think many here are missing the real problem: Why should customers have to pay for support to fix problems on Google’s end?
- jschwartzi 7y agoI don't see "Fortune 100-level support" listed on Google's website. How do I purchase it?
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agohttps://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans "Contact Sales"
- jdlshore 7y agoPresumably, by spending enough money to get an account manager, then asking them to sell you a support contract.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoAccount manager and support contract are sold together... $150,000/yr paid up front + 4% of yearly spend. Seems insanely high, especially compared to the next step down which is only $250/mo per user... you could get by with a separate account with a single master user that controlled all the deployments and billing and only pay $3,000/yr. What you get for that extra $147,000+/year is that you talk directly with the lowest level engineer actually working on the problem rather than relaying messages that lose context... but you'll still need to know what you're talking about and be able to actually help the engineer rather than spin them in circles, or you'll be kept at bay.
- crtlaltdel 7y agoyeah, in my exp in industrial you can get a applications engineer on thr phone and even an office visit if you pay enough
- spc476 7y agoI'm becoming more and more convinced that Google employees don't give out reasons for their decisions because they can't! They trust too much in their machine learning and there's no way for employees to know why this event triggered over that one.
- qeqeqeqe 7y agoOr (more likely) because they are not allowed to by policy.
- londons_explore 7y agoOr because the machine won't tell them why because privacy. (Although this applies less in the ad side of the business than consumer facing bits)
- fragmede 7y agoIf your ml model is a magic black box and there's zero visibility into the system, even internally, as to the signals that resulted in a decision, you've hired a monkey that can run a tensorflow tutorial, not actually someone that understands machine learning.
- hnick 7y agoYou get better support if your $15 hamburger meal is missing cheese. It's weird that companies that operate at scale get a free pass to ignore smaller customers just because they have bigger ones.
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe reason lack of support works at scale is that they are successful with resources channeled places other than direct support so their strategy doesn't need it. It is sort of a "cars don't handle rugged terrain as well as horses" thing, it isn't crippling when the use case is paved roads. It may suck for your use case but it makes sense.
- refurb 7y agoYou get better support if your $15 hamburger meal is missing cheese. That's a great way of putting it and 100% accurate. Fast food joints set a minimal customer service level magnitudes better than Google.
- moksly 7y agoThey don’t really get a free pass though, maybe in their monopoly market of advertisement, but their poor support is one of the primary reasons google cloud isn’t earning any of the European public cloud money while Azure and AWS are having a party. Google has a lot of really good tools, that they could sell to enterprise. You could argue that they have the only viable Office365 alternative for non-tech enterprise. But they just don’t seem to know how to sell it because their advertising monopoly infects everything they do. The single place they’ve been successful is in education, and even there they are struggling to keep supplying what schools actually want + privacy. So I fully expect to see them driven out of this space in the coming decade.
- banku_brougham 7y agoSounds kind of like monopolistic behavior or something
- mc3 7y agoThere was no other marketing channels you could use than Google Ads?
- flukus 7y agoI think you've identified the root cause here. The single point of failure for the business was it's reliance on a tech giant and it's fickle algorithms. Even if google were perfect that's a precarious position to be in.
- mc3 7y agoEspecially for a "brick and mortar business" I can't see why you couldn't try other things - direct marketing, cold calling, events, cards in doctor's offices, whatever else.
- luckylion 7y agoGenerally, you can, but they are a different beast. You have little way to measure them, they are very time consuming, high risk compared to Ads (because you can't change your cards when you notice a week in that customers don't like some word etc). That's a valid long-term strategy, not something to get you business next week when you're starting.
- jraby3 7y agoClickcease.com is an Israeli company that helps prevent this. It’s a common tactic in high cost keyword industries like lock smiths. Sorry to hear about your experience. That sucks.
- jussij 7y agoSo if Clickcease.com can help prevent this, why on earth can't Google itself help prevent this?
- hydrox24 7y agoGoogle almost certainly can, but probably has no incentive to do it for whatever reason.
- macNchz 7y ago> Google almost certainly can, but probably has no incentive to do it for whatever reason. This has been my conclusion several times after digging deep into some weird data and discovering one of these...'grey areas' where it seems like if they cared about their customers they'd be doing something about it, but presumably they prefer having revenue from unsophisticated ad buyers. Some of the things they turn on by default are straight up rackets, "Search Partners" for example. Companies like ask.com are arbitraging keyword traffic by buying ads to their own search results pages. These are "Search Partners" that show the ads you're paying Google for, but they're full of dark patterns to make you click the ads, and cost the same as a click directly from the Google results!
- buboard 7y agoit feels like, if your entire business rests on online bookings, you should have created alternative mechanisms to access your customers, via subscriptions or other kinds of promotion