4 ms·

Google ads in the health sector is tough, we tried advertising a medication/pill management software (for keeping track of times, stock, etc. with a twist), and

Google ads in the health sector is tough, we tried advertising a medication/pill management software (for keeping track of times, stock, etc. with a twist), and Google was extremely frustrating in randomly restricting our keywords, and we had to repeatedly assert that we were NOT advertising medications. They did not ban our account or anything, they were happy to take a few of our dollars :) (we didn't get to the MVP stage, just an embarassingly bad landing page), but traffic was a lot less than I expected (and I can't seem to tweak our ads to stay out of Indian pages, we wanted U.S. only). At least we only paid per clicks.

josefresco 14y ago
Yeah I lost count on how many times I had to tell Google my client was not a pharmacy and not offering any prescription medications (even though we were bidding on terms that related to that market segment). I understand (and can tolerate) false positives in regards to software but there was no excuse for the uneven application by human editors of the guidelines.
- derefr 14y ago
  > I understand (and can tolerate) false positives in regards to software but there was no excuse for the uneven application by human editors of the guidelines. Why? Humans are more fallible than computers, not less. Expecting that replacing the computers in a process with humans will improve predictability is insanity.
- dhimes 14y ago
  I had the same problem in education, actually. I sell tutorial software, and they were flagging me for being an essay farm. And real essay farms were passing through! After years of flagging, checking, and verifying ok, they still flagged every single ad. I tried get them to move towards a 'trust me, spot check, and ban me forever if you catch me cheating' model (hell, my grocery store does this for me- I can carry a scanner and ring up my own items). But they wouldn't do it.

josefresco 14y ago

Yeah I lost count on how many times I had to tell Google my client was not a pharmacy and not offering any prescription medications (even though we were bidding on terms that related to that market segment). I understand (and can tolerate) false positives in regards to software but there was no excuse for the uneven application by human editors of the guidelines.

derefr 14y ago
> I understand (and can tolerate) false positives in regards to software but there was no excuse for the uneven application by human editors of the guidelines. Why? Humans are more fallible than computers, not less. Expecting that replacing the computers in a process with humans will improve predictability is insanity.
dhimes 14y ago
I had the same problem in education, actually. I sell tutorial software, and they were flagging me for being an essay farm. And real essay farms were passing through! After years of flagging, checking, and verifying ok, they still flagged every single ad. I tried get them to move towards a 'trust me, spot check, and ban me forever if you catch me cheating' model (hell, my grocery store does this for me- I can carry a scanner and ring up my own items). But they wouldn't do it.