
My biggest frustration with Google AdWords - swombat
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/01/26/my-biggest-frustration-with-google-adwords/
======
leftnode
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=rifle+scopes>
<http://www.google.com/search?q=ar15+handguard>

Thats my biggest frustration with AdWords.

~~~
jcampbell1
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.

~~~
stanley
Ads may get auto approved but they are still reviewed sooner or later. On top
of that, absolutely all pages get reviewed, if not initially by human
reviewers then by Google's crawlers. We spend $xxx,xxx on Google each month,
it pays for us to know intimately how their systems work. They're watching us
and we're watching them.

~~~
jcampbell1
There is still a huge difference between declining all ads unless they are
explicitly approved, and having people explicitly disapprove ads.

I know the rules quite well, have never had an ad disapproved, but the process
is just frustratingly slow.

------
dhimes
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...

~~~
bambax
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).

~~~
notahacker
That's the biggest problem of all: although they may have improved in the past
few years, Google's filters to keep out scam sites aren't even borderline
adequate anyway.

Google "HYIP" and click on one of the ads if you want to find a website to
help you give your money to criminals operating Ponzi schemes. Now granted, a
lot of people searching for implausibly high yield investment plans are aware
of the rules of the shady game they're getting into, but they really ought to
be triggering more filters and failing more manual reviews than bingo card
creation.

------
patio11
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
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.

~~~
bambax
> 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.

------
acangiano
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.

~~~
alain94040
Is there a business opportunity in here somewhere?

Can someone sell 3rd-party support for Google? I know it sounds crazy, but
there has to be a way to "arbitrage" their lack of support. In a sense, that's
what SEO consultants are: they know how to make things happen despite Google's
obscurity.

Any better ideas?

~~~
simonk
Its already happening in Google Apps. Technically Google provides free support
and phone support if you pay $50/year but if you signup with a reseller they
also provide support and usually have a contact at Google for any issue they
can't resolve.

------
il
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.

~~~
portman
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
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
In the UK I think it is about 20k per month

~~~
axod
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

~~~
rfergie
How recent was this?

At the start of January they reduced the number of accounts who have
individual reps.

However, I work for an agency; the support model might be different for
individual advertisers

------
SoftwareMaven
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
> 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. :)

------
tzs
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
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
Don't be evil?

"Being less bad is not being good." - William McDonough in Cradle to Cradle.

------
brc
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
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.

~~~
brc
The conversions code is the standard adwords conversion javascript, added to
the final 'thanks for your order' page.

I would agree with you about the myspace thing- but I ended up with 5 or 10 of
these bogus conversions, all on pretty low total clicks (I'm talking 10's of
clicks resulting in a conversion). My best referral partners don't go anywhere
near those sorts of numbers. In other words, one case makes a fluke (and
myspace is highly visited, so I can agree with your theory) but after a couple
of rare cases, you start to invoke the law of unlikely statistics in your head
and say 'wait a minute...'

Here are some stats:

domain___cl_impr__CTR__ACPC_Cost_Cv_Co/Cv_CvRate

xqno.com 13 1,138 1.14% $0.64 $8.33 2 $4.16 15.38%

There's more like this. Some have 1 click, 3 impressions and a 100% conversion
rate. No way is that going to happen more than once in a very long time, yet
my adwords account has about 5 of these. And none of the conversions shows up
in analytics.

Anything that was giving me numbers like that- you'd say 'yeah, go for it'.
But I could find no actual conversions in analytics for that domain.

Looking at that domain we see a Url shortener with one google ad at the
bottom. Just knowing my other referral rates and conversion rates for highly-
relevant sites, makes me believe firmly that these stats are just plain wrong.

~~~
Natsu
Assuming your site is small enough that they don't optimize to beat you
specifically, the best way to defeat any kind of automatic spamming is to make
your site unique in some trivial way.

Even if it would take them almost no effort for them to change their tools to
spam you, they won't bother if you're too small for them to notice.

~~~
brc
Not sure what you're saying here. What I'm witnessing is click-fraud. It would
seem like nobody is stupid enough to run 1000 clicks on my ad on their site,
but they seem to nickel and dime each advertiser - a click here, a click
there, nothing that couldn't be disproven. There seems to be a lot of work
needed to wade through the display network. I don't know how the false
conversions happen. It would seem to me they have found a way.

~~~
Natsu
I was talking about spotting the fake conversions. If you're using the
standard code, it might be worth seeing if you can make it slightly non-
standard enough that any standard way of faking it won't work.

But maybe that requires something on Google's end; I haven't looked at it so I
can't say.

------
damoncali
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
There are keyword triggers- you probably avoid them. I know groups whose ads
fly in minutes.

------
jeffreyrusso
This leaked data from June 2010 gives some interesting insight into the
distribution of AdWords account sizes... [http://searchengineland.com/googles-
top-adwords-advertisers-...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-top-adwords-
advertisers-leaked-document-reveals-advertising-dollars-49918)

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.

------
Natsu
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.

------
rumpelstiltskin
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.

------
revorad
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
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?

------
Joakal
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-...](http://searchengineland.com/remember-that-adsense-publisher-
that-sued-google-won-well-he-lost-20663)

------
alain94040
Just go to Facebook, their ads work better anyway:
[http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/07/22/facebook-ads-
crush-g...](http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/07/22/facebook-ads-crush-google-
adwords-for-the-founder-conference/)

A little bit of competition always helps improve customer service.

~~~
patio11
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
Agreed. Facebook is where teachers go when they're _not_ thinking about
teaching.

------
robryan
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
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.

------
malloreon
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.

------
lazyant
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".

------
wacheena
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.

------
edash
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.

------
robryan
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.

------
dabent
"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.

------
joelrunyon
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.

------
robryan
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
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...)

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

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

~~~
brownleej
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.

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

------
earl
To quote myself, yesterday: ( <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.

~~~
mmaunder
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
_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
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
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
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.

~~~
pasbesoin
I'd like information/opinions anyone has to share on the real availability and
quality of that support.

And what qualifies as "Enterprise"? If you've 15 Google Apps seats and are
paying your $50/year/seat, do you actually get useful responses in a timely
manner?

(It seems those dollar amounts would be well below anything "Enterprise". But
I figure the multiple-thousand-seat clients are getting support from
somewhere. Maybe this means the small fish who pay, can actually get some
level of response?)

~~~
ydant
I had 3 paid seats (now 11) when I contacted Google support regarding a hosted
Apps account. I received a response fairly quickly (within a few hours), a
response and resolution within 10 minutes of replying to the initial support
email follow-up, and I continued to have a discussion and further support
responses from the same person over the next few days.

So I'd say absolutely that my $150 bought me a name and a face and good
support.

They also have phone support, but I have not used it.

------
hiro23
Can't disagree...

