

My Adwords Are Turned Off - patio11
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/01/my-adwords-are-turned-off-scary-stuff/

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jacquesm
Operating in googles ecosystem is a very scary business model. One day you're
making money, the next you are begging for scraps. It's like the farmers of
old that had to deal with the weather without forecasts or even a basic
understanding of the driving mechanisms.

If your business depends on ONE source of income only, and that source of
income goes down the drain you are toast. If you currently have a good income
stream from a single source then use all the spare time you've got to build a
second one, sooner or later you will need it.

And yes, google support sucks. I've yet to get a real and to the point answer
to any questions I've ever sent them. Customer service is definitely not their
strong suit.

~~~
vaksel
I don't understand the guy's attitude. Why is he doing a wait and see
approach, instead of opening a Yahoo ads account and using those for a while?

~~~
patio11
I am "the guy". I have a Yahoo account (currently inactive) and an MSN
account.

The biggest issue I have with the two "competitors" to Google, and I use that
term loosely, is that they don't have nearly enough inventory to sell me to
make it worth my time. Example: I have bought approximately 65,000 clicks in
from Google in this calendar year. Over the same period, Microsoft (which
plain _lacks_ a display network, where I get most of my clicks) has managed to
find less than 1,000.

Yahoo was similarly terrible back when I used them, and in addition to
charging me too much for not enough, they routinely borked their conversion
counting, causing me to believe my spending on them was profitable when it
was, in fact, not. After I audited their numbers and discovered their lack of
facility with math, I stopped advertising with them.

~~~
axod
I had similar experiences. Also when I last used Yahoo they had a "minimum
spend" restriction, which meant that if they were unable to find you enough
traffic, they'd charge you any way!!?! I closed my account after a couple of
months of them charging me because they couldn't deliver enough traffic.

You should definitely always contact google by phone though. Email never works
well.

------
axod
Call your Adwords account manager on the phone (They answer the phone
quickly). At least in the UK.

Email for this sort of thing simply doesn't work well.

------
ivanyv
_We’re little annoying things that don’t scale well when we can’t be handled
perfectly algorithmically like all the world’s information (TM)_

That's exactly the way I feel about Google too. 'Nuff said.

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bemmu
If you look at Google Trends, "bingo" is searched for more in Sweden than in
the USA. Perhaps localizing to Swedish or some other locales would make sense,
since there is probably less adwords competition? Change the strings in the
software, get a clued translator (often I see utterly terrible "translations"
of foreign landing pages) to also do the landing page and ads.

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quellhorst
Considering all the error's I am getting on the page, I hope he isn't paying
for adwords traffic.

Couldn't write to: /var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-content/cache/wp-
cache-c35bfed8135767fe63f5725b08629444.html Warning:
fopen(/var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-content/cache/wp-
cache-c35bfed8135767fe63f5725b08629444.meta) [function.fopen]: failed to open
stream: Permission denied in /var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-
cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 240

~~~
patio11
I keep the blog off the business server _precisely_ to avoid the business
croaking when I make a poorly thought-out chmod decision at 2:30 in the
morning when troubleshooting traffic issues.

(They want me to make my whole wp-content directory writable? _Really?_ )

------
paraschopra
The article was nice and informative but I immediately stopped reading when I
encountered this statement: "You weren’t even worth enough of our time to have
one of our $6 an hour Indian callcenter employees sign her name to this."

I think this generalization was unneccessary and was actually insulting. As an
Indian myself, I feel bad for this widespread attitude.

------
tumult
There was a bug in the Rails code he wrote, so he berates Google until the
last couple of paragraphs when he explains it was his fault (he thinks?) Did I
overlook something in the article?

I think that's exactly why Google sends out form letters as their first wave
of defense.

~~~
patio11
_Did I overlook something in the article?_

Well, it could have been the bug in my Rails code. I find that unlikely,
because the numerical impact would not push this campaign out of its
historical norms. It could have been a bug in Google's code (like their
automated diagnostic reporting "Your account has no credit card associated
with it", which is contrary to the truth and scares me because if the right
hand of their system is as borked as the left hand then that very well could
be my problem). It could have been a concerted effort by a group of bored
Dutch housewives to simultaneously monopolize 99.999% of the entire
advertising inventory on teaching bingo sites.

If Google were interested in talking to me, there would be a little less wild
speculation above. Heck, "I checked your account. Everything is fine on our
end. Best of luck to you." would be an improvement on the answer I got.

~~~
tumult
I can understand your frustration, but this is how it works almost anywhere.
Like if someone joins an IRC channel about a programming language and says
something like "I'm getting build error X when including library Y" people
will just say "working fine here" or "did you check the wiki?" or something
like that. Someone will have to surrender time to help you and you'll have to
give more information and run through options with them.

I mean, it could be a lot of different things causing it.

The bogus error is bad, though. Also, as a paying customer, you would think
they would have a better response. Damn :[

Maybe someone ran some numbers and found out it was a better idea to just hit
everyone with form letters first, to dissuade the people who will never get
adwords working anyway.

~~~
pegobry
The difference is that in an IRC channel, you're not the other guys' _paying
customer_...

------
pegobry
Maybe Google should've bought Zappos instead of Amazon, have some of that
fanatical customer service culture seep in..

