1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.
2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.
The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.
While you make valid points, the major issue in question is Google's lack of customer service for the advertisement brokerage service they provide. Google may not have to "tell you a damn thing", but they should at least make themselves available to deny any requested information.
Google is the customer here. They happen to be a very big customer who is aggregating and organizing adspace inventory for thousands of their customers. But as with any such relationship, they are free to walk away at any time.
And yes it sucks; but there must be advertisers out there who think that a site that gets 10,000 impressions a day and is linked from most of the popular news sites is worth something; selling to them is a better move than whining about how Google doesn't love you anymore.
Speaking as an advertiser, I would love nothing more than to have 10,000 economically pinched nerds see a banner ad for my service, as I target the price sensitive consumer.
My strategy with advertising is more to say "hey, look at me, I exist" Once you know I exist, the price differences between my competitors and I give you enough reason to research me a bit more, and perhaps give me a try. So personally, I care more about cost per impression than cost per click.
Heh. this is the second time I've suggested 'project wonderful' - but as an advertiser it meets my needs exactly, except that it seems to be more popular with the webcomic set than the 'nerd news' set.
Well said. Further to the above, Google had a very good reason to drop this particular site: Over the span of a week, their impression count shot through the roof with the sort of traffic that never clicks ads.
So all Google sees is a whole ton of 0.0000001% clickthru impressions coming from a former backwater site. If my ads were serving there, I'd certainly want them pulled.
Granted, Google is terrible when it comes to situations like this. But technically they did the correct thing here.
So "technically" allowing a number of days to go by without response, not providing a method to escalate an issue, or not providing a method for users to get any straight forward answers about a particular situation that Google initiated is, as you said, correct?
I thought advertisers were paying for clicks, not impressions? Why should the advertisers be upset if they are getting lots of free impressions?
If your answer has something to do with "it messes up their math" in terms of knowing how well an ad performs, all I can say is "that's a math problem".
I don't think #1 is as cut-and-dry as you're making it out to be. It depends on how you squint - you could just as easily say that you're selling it to the companies who are paying for the ads, and that both parties are hiring Google to mediate that relationship.
Point 1---true enough, but if I decide to drop BellSouth phone service, I'm still liable for any outstanding amounts I owe them. Why does Google get to walk away without paying what it owes the website owner who hosted the ads?
Which is where his entire opinion fails. Google may be purchasing ad space, but THEY are defining the price. They are also earning profit from my ad space. On top of that, apparently they can refuse payment for past money owed if they wish. It's ludicrous and there needs to be a way to communicate with our "customer" to get them to pay their "bill" (or, you know, reinstate an account we have with them).
One thing I would like to point out: Going from 100 hits a day to over 10,000 hits a day does NOT look like regular traffic. If anything, it looks more like bot activity than anything, which is definitely against the ToS, and would be plenty reason to shut down your account.
I'm not in the position to do so, but if I ran an advertisements, and suddenly saw 100x the regular users hitting the site, I'd be pulling the ads.
If you're paying by the click and the clicks are not fraudulent (and the amount of traffic says nothing about it being fraudulent or not) then there is no reason to pull the account if the traffic goes up.
Google's ad-insert can see the referrer field; they can confirm that the site is really linked from the originating site. With their toolbar and analytics data and giant AdSense network, they know better than anyone how much traffic an outlink from these sites sends.
So while they know the surge is different, they should also know exactly how it's different, and that it's not "bot activity". Holding back ads from all such ephemeral traffic would make sense -- and serving appropriate lower-value ads the most sense -- but banning the account does not.
As happy as I am that you're Google's unofficial ombudsman, Matt, you're a big billion dollar company who many of us are intensely reliant on for our businesses. There needs to be a support channel other than "make a PR issue for Google and Matt Cutts will swoop by to save the day".
I had a big issue with AdWords earlier this month. Google made it all but impossible for me to reach anyone about it. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my bank denying an AdWords bill (to protect me against possible fraud). It took one minute on the phone to resolve.
You make a hundred times what my bank does off me. Why is human contact only possible if we speak the secret password into the telephone disguised as a shoe which is stored in the unused broom closet marked Beware of Leopard.
Though it may not be a complete answer, it is encouraging that people from Google will reply on public forums. You'd never see an Apple employee posting on a thread about someone whose iPhone app had been sitting in the pipeline for months, or a Paypal employee posting on a thread about someone whose account had been summarily frozen.
On the other hand, the Google employee who has answered here is Matt Cutts. I doubt many lesser-known employees at Google have the luxury of replying outside of official company forums and sites in such a manner.
From personal experience, finding an Apple employee who can even find out what is going on with an iPhone app waiting for review for months can be difficult if not impossible without connections inside the company. However, if you have a development-related question or a bug report you want looked at, there's plenty of Apple employees on Twitter that would be happy to answer such as Chris Espinosa (a manager on the Xcode team and Apple employee #8, @cdespinosa) and Michael Jurewitz (developer tools evangelist, @jurewitz).
I'm not saying the poster is necessarily faking, but how should we know that someone who chose the name MattCutts is the Matt Cutts he claims to be? Do we assume he's not an impersonator because we like his answer? This comment is the very first activity on that account.
And of course anybody who hacked your HN account couldn't possibly have hacked your Twitter account (assuming they are both really u, and u'r the Google Matt Cubbs). :=)
The difference is that Apple is just being Apple while they try to figure out how to handle the App Store. I'm not saying it is right, but there's a certain intelligence and style behind the way Apple ignores people.
Google, on the other hand, is just incompetent.
(And PayPal is, too, but they seem to be slowly learning.)
I disagree. Google is just being Google. They've always been a company that does very cool (and non-evil) projects, but doesn't really bend over backwards to listen to customers. I always get the impression that they're too busy working on their latest game-changing scheme to be bothered with little details like keeping customers happy.
under which definition Apple is not just being Apple but is incompetent since they are doing the same thing you point to Google as doing. You can't have it one way for Apple and another for Google.
I'd wager that he's offering to help not because Google is such a friendly and benevolent business entity, but because it's in the spirit of Hacker News (and ultimately, in Google's best interest to do so).
The credibility of Don't Be Evil is taking a lot of hits these days. Some of us were never really convinced.
Google and PayPal both fall into the category of not putting enough profits into customer support.
This is what most fear from market consolidation and extremely large companies. They squeeze more profits from doing things that a company without monopoly-like characteristics could not get away with. To me, when you cross this line, you have become evil.
fyi, I spent more than 2 hours last night getting my PayPal personal account unlocked. It was an awful web and phone customer support and terrible security practices.
It's great to see this discussion here and especially to have Matt Cutts weighing in.
It does seem like this is an endemic problem in Google and comes right from the top. Some startups focus on customer service and use it as a differentiator. Others focus on product and believe they can build their way out of support.
Google is and always has been in the second category. The mindset is from what I understand firmly held by Larry and Sergey and manifests itself through the whole company. Until they change, it seems unlikely the support teams will change.
Yes, this does seem to be a top-down problem and not a result of incompetence.
I'm guessing they won't change until they see their profits effected. As to PayPal, I have chosen other providers. So I only have to deal with them if some vendor only accepts PayPal and I really want to use that vendor.
As for Google, for now, I don't need to serve up ads. If and when I do, I will spend time to see if alternate ad brokers can give me equal or better returns. Google knows that their hold on the ad market stays as long as buyers and publishers do not move in sync. That is, its very hard for a publisher to use a different brokerage when all the buyers feel they need to use Google (and vice verse). This movement is probably best done by market segment. Specialty brokers ("we only do blogs", "we do sports very well", etc) should be the ones to disrupt this space. I guess this is already being done, but it certainly isn't happening fast enough. Ideas?
This comment is obviously an utter and complete waste of space, but I couldn't resist pointing out the irony of someone called "lucifer" failing to see how something is evil.
Actually, the root meaning of the name is 'Light', from which one can arrive at the notion of 'Sight' So what is really ironic is that any sentient would deny their inner lucifer and presume for itself an objective view of truth ...
There is a support channel for appeals, and it sounds like hizook.com submitted an appeal via that channel earlier this week. My guess is that the Google team is already looking into it; I just wanted to let people know that I'd ask the relevant team from my side as well.
Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would be difficult to have one-on-one conversations with all of them even if everyone at Google did nothing but try to provide that support. Historically, we try to tackle that challenge by reducing the need to talk to a person at all (e.g. our webmaster tools let people diagnose lots of issues without talking to a webmaster expert at Google). We try to pursue scalable communication methods such as forums and keeping an eye on the blogosphere too. I wouldn't claim that we're perfect--I'd be curious to hear more about the AdWords issue that you had--but our first instinct is to look for ways so that people don't need to telephone Google in the first place. I think a lot of companies do that; I can't remember the last time I needed to talk to Amazon or Facebook or Netflix on the phone, for example.
But I take your point, and while we do have support channels, I think it's good to keep an eye out for blog posts because that feedback can help us improve so that future people interacting with Google don't get as frustrated.
A part of that frustration has to be from that email that gets sent out. I haven't been on the receiving end, but I've read it in a couple of blog posts about this sort of thing, and honestly: that letter is awful.
It contains exactly one piece of "useful" information, the link to the disabled account FAQ. The rest is just simply terrible. It starts with a very serious accusation, intoning "significant risk" and "financial damage", but Google wasn't "compelled" or "forced" to act, it "decided" to, implying not that some mandatory threshold was reached but that someone sat down and worked it out and reluctantly agreed that this was the way to go, or worse, that sometimes similar situations might go the other way.
Immediately after accusing the person of being an evil bastard, it turns on the smarmy fake politeness. "Please understand" that we think you're an evil bastard. "Thank you" for understanding that we think you're an evil bastard. And thanks for "cooperating", even though you actually have no choice in the matter at all. If you have any questions, kindly fuck off and don't use the same method of communication we just used to reach you, here's a link to more standardized dehumanizing copy.
It reads like Google is breaking up with you while checking its phone, acting like you've done something horrible enough to merit no discussion on the matter, trying to act nice enough so you don't think it's a bitch, but making it clear it doesn't give a shit and really never did.
calambrac, I personally agree with you about the wording/tone of the current letter. I would like them to take a look at changing that, although no one will ever be delighted to get that letter.
That's true, it's always going to be a hard letter to get, and I'm sure that most of the time it's being sent to people who deserve to get it. I think a rewrite should simply dispense with the dire accusations, the fake politeness, and the implication that there's a significant human presence behind the individual decision. Don't waste people's time or patronize them, be direct about what's happening and acknowledge that there may be some kind of recourse if you want to work through the process. 'We're disabling your account because our algorithm told us to. We regret if this is an error, please see this page for more information if you feel this is the case.'
Yes, it's a nasty, no-easy-solution dilemma: Shugging off the spammers yet not mistreating the "false positive" decent customers that your algorithm bans.
What I find distressing (and would find even more so had I been the victim) is that Google refuses to to identify which part of TOS have been violated. Police and courts have to specify which parts of criminal code a defendant is accused of violating. Can we not get similar fairness from corporate America?
Are you afraid that such clarifications would give too much useful info to actual spammers?
Well, maybe a slight edge. But I might compare this to the dilemma that clarifying legal defendants their constitutional rights ("Miranda" in the U.S.) deprives law enforcement of some opportunities to tap some useful self-incrimination: It's part of the cost of valuing Constitutional rights. Would Google dare to offer its customers some Consumer Bill of Rights?
Google is in a contractual business relationship with its partners, not an hiring or governing relationship. The contract may suck, but does anyone sign up for AdSense because the contract is great?
Not really. In Google's eyes (or Google's algorithm's eyes) you "earned" your Adsense credits in a way that was unfair to the advertisers. So basically Google's returning the TV, sofa and cat that you "stole" from advertisers in the Adsense network in the first place. Obviously the process by which Google decides what accounts are fraudulent is imperfect, so some of the time legitimate accounts will get flagged.
I do agree though that this is a big enough problem that Google should devote more time and effort to improving the systems they use to flag Adsense accounts, and certainly improve the letter and general customer support experience once your account has been flagged.
"So basically Google's returning the TV, sofa and cat that you "stole" from advertisers in the Adsense network in the first place."
I haven't heard either way but if you're an advertiser, does goog credit your account - "we believe these x number of clicks you paid for were fraudulent, so we're not charging/crediting you for them."
Half of my business comes from AdWords and I'm pretty happy with it. Actually, you could go substantially farther than that: I'm literally a case study for it, recommend it any chance I get, and despite what I'm about to tell you continue to recommend it.
One day, for no reason I could be certain of, AdWords just stopped serving my ads. Google's automated diagnostic said that you had no credit card on file for my account. That was contrary to reality, as you had already successfully billed me for $300 that week and about $12k total.
I respect that you would rather I use the self-help automated diagnostic, FAQ, and whatnot. But either the diagnostic was broken or your data was, and the FAQ didn't address "What to do if our diagnostic tells you untrue things". So I tried to contact support.
After digging through about 5 separate redirects to get to "contact an AdWords representative", I wrote up a detailed bug report (or as detailed as the 512 character limit would accept) and sent it in. As for what I got back, you can read the above blog post, but it was non-responsive and appears to be computer generated for me.
In the wake of the above blog post and further attempts to use the "scalable communication methods", I was contacted by an AdWords representative. This is now several days after I had first contacted Google. She successfully summarized my issue (which proves that she was not a computer -- an oddly comforting notion to me by this point) and said she would escalate it to a specialist to investigate.
That was a month ago. I still haven't heard back.
On the plus side, the symptom which was of most immediate concern to me (my sales dropping by half because my AdWords ads were not showing) recovered before I missed my entire busy season, and things are more or less normal for me now.
I'm glad that the ads are running again. Reading through your blog post, it seems entirely possible that the @welcome variable not being defined could cause an issue with conversion tracking (although I don't have any first-hand knowledge). I wonder if the AdWords rep worked to make sure that the issue got escalated/resolved, but was working under the impression that you didn't need to be contacted back afterwards?
Then that support rep needs to go on a very basic, low level training course, to find out the basic truth that "if you've done the work, you should at least make a token effort to get the credit for the work".
I never understand people who go to all sorts of lengths to get something done and then don't get back to you to let you know that it's been done. It always seems suspicious to me (though I like to remind my self not to ascribe to malice what can be perfectly well explained by incompetence).
I specifically requested contact after they had determined the cause of the issue, and $REP_NAME assured me that I would be contacted with results of the investigation. That contact was on August 5th, roughly a week after my initial bug report, five days after my blog post, and a day after the problem had begun to rectify itself (and I posted the blog update).
Despite $REP_NAME's assurance that the matter was being looked into and that I would be contacted again when the investigation was complete, I have not heard anything about this matter since August 5th.
I value my business relationship with Google. So much so, in fact, that I am increasing my ad spend -- you have the best solution for advertising for small businesses, bar none, warts and all. However, Google's recent performance has not caused me to think that Google values its business relationship with me.
The point in the above comment is that adwords customers with large accounts pay such large amounts each month because
When you do get to speak to someone (via above hidden shoephone method) it's still like speaking to a clumsy CIA agent. In fact I spent most of this morning doing that. It seems very clear that the googlers on the other end of the shoe phone aren't allowed to disclose much. They allude. They read out the relevant policies to hint at what might be going on. [me]'Has a trademark complaint been made?' [Googler]'All I can say is that your ads have been manually disabled at some point last week?' [me]'Would it help if I got the trademark owner on the phone?' {Trademark owner has already told us that they don't know what is going on. Google has been impossible to get on the phone and answer emails extremely vaguely} [googler] 'reads some policy that hints at a recent complaint' [me] 'Can you email me the procedure for trademark exception.' [googler] 'Google it'
challenge Try & find the form you need to have filled in order to get approval to advertise using someone's trademark.
We are talking about customers that have spent hundreds of thousands with google over time. Google allows itself to unceremoniously damage their business as if they are doing something shady. They then make it impossible to contact them and when they are contacted, well they make phone companies look good.
Answering blog posts is great. Writing your blog is great. It isn't instead of normal customer support though.
I'm so tired of big companies pointing to their huge userbase as a reason for bad customer support. I've heard it from Google, Skype, and HostGator.
I've also specifically tried to contact AdSense via the contact form, email, and the forum about a missing payment. Never heard a peep back, so I stopped running AdSense.
I'm happy to read the FAQs, search a knowledgebase, and communicate via email or a ticket system, because I know its not feasible to talk to all customers on the phone. But you can't just leave people in the lurch when you want to be their business partner.
Successful companies see customer service as an opportunity to right a wrong and impress their customers, not as a nuisance.
Matt, thanks for the explanation and acknowledging the fact that it is not a perfect (or even a good) system.
Lets say I was in the OP's position and I have legitimate reasons to believe that Google is at fault here and they banned my account by mistake - but after weeks of trying they didn't get back to me (I only received automated e-mail, which are vague at explaining what going on). Assuming that scenario, my best option to get someone noticed is to make a blog post and submit it on HN and/or e-mail you about it or hope that you will notice it here?
Surely, there are better way to handle this?
This is not the only case, there are literally 1000s of such stories for many years all over the blogoshphere and forums.
For instances like these, I would happily pay $x per minute to talk to a real person.
A high call charge would prevent random crazies from calling (e.g. "why isn't my website top of the search rankings!?!?"), but would at least give the chance for people for whom Google's service has financial implications the chance to talk to a real person who can get appropriate answers from within the company.
And if random crazies do end up calling it, then maybe that's a new revenue stream for Google?
Perhaps they should be responsible for lost revenue in cases where their incorrect assessment hurts the business. That would at least make it somewhat important to them to implement a working solution, scalable or not.
While I'm willing to pay $x for a call, if I'm in the right I want to be reimbursed for it (MS is actually quite good about this).
As has been pointed out here before, Google are essentially a customer in this situation, therefore they are under no real obligation to keep buying ad impressions from you, so I'm not sure 'lost revenue' liability would be particularly fair or enforceable.
But I agree that reimbursement for the cost of a call that results from their inability to deal with your problem through any other channels would be appropriate.
In the Adsense cases, the argument can be made (not sure I fully agree, but I don't use Adsense so I can't really speak specifically about it, but customers can be held accountable for interfering with business operations). In the Adwords cases (patio1, e.g.), Google is the vendor.
It seems to me that the way you deal with having too many users to economically support is to have a support route with a high barrier to entry. That's not to say that the route should be hidden; but, for example, it could cost money, which is refundable in the case where there's a genuine grievance.
barrkel, I can speak to some of the thinking on the search result ranking side. I believe the feeling has been that asking people to pay for support creates worse incentives, because it turns something that people shouldn't have to do (contact Google for support) into a source of revenue.
It's a similar situation to pay-for-inclusion in the search index: a search engine should include as many pages/sites in its index as possible, and if someone can pay the search engine to include their site, then it creates a weird incentive for the search engine to not do a great job of crawling the web.
At least on the organic/ranking side, that's at least part of the reason why Google has never done pay-for-inclusion or pay-for support for webmasters.
Fully agree about perverse incentives in search result / ranking, but do not think it applies in nearly the same way when there's a business relationship, such as adwords etc.
Maybe someday your super sophisticated fraud detection software could be made to check and see if someone got slashdotted.
I understand this would involve knowing the content of billions of websites and figuring out which ones link to each other.
Who could possibly be expected to keep track of all that information?
So keep your pants on everyone. The scope of this problem is insurmountable especially since there are only thirty days in the month (or six) before you get paid for your clicks and impressions to discover fraud.
I can't tell if your comment is sarcastic, but I imagine Google, the masters of search, keep track of all that information already. And checking major aggregate news sites is far from "super sophisticated". I wouldn't be surprised if most false-positive frauds were attributed to sudden spikes attributed to slashdot, digg, or HN.
When this many people express frustration with their inability to talk to a person, you have a problem. Your methods aren't working. Sending an email isn't enough; people need feedback to be reassured someone is, in fact, helping them.
When I asked them to reinstate my account when I was blocked (a good couple years ago) for, what they told me, click-fraud, they took a couple days and said something in the line of "we looked into it and we were right, but we can't tell you what or how we identified it". In other words, people are punished and they can't even look at the evidence that bases the accusation.
The problem is that the support channel is a black hole. There's no way of knowing where your request is in the queue. Has it been reviewed? dismissed? do you need to be more patient? should you submit it again?
What about starting with giving out the average response time and queue length when submitting a request? That'd be a good first step...
Even if you had a "I need to get this resolved NOW" option that costs $100, I'd be delighted. I've had one false positive and I was never able to get it resolved and I never knew why it occurred. I'm not a huge blogger, I just run a few small unique sites that all adhere properly. I don't even know which site at the time was to blame.
There's a support channel for appeals? Not hardly.
As I mentioned in my anti-Google Checkout article on Slash7 (which you commented on), not only has Google attempted to steal money from me by closing my Checkout account, but my husband lost over $2,000 of Adsense money when his account was arbitrarily closed.
He's the author of Scriptaculous - and the ads were on the Scriptaculous site - a totally innocent open source contributor.
So, support money was effectively stolen from a popular open source project.
Of course he appealed.
And he never heard back.
The commenter above is right: One-off help for those who are able to make a lot of noise, and hurt Google's image, is not enough. It got me my Checkout account back, and it will probably get the OP's Adsense account back.
But my husband never made a public fuss, and so of course all his attempts to reach out to Google were completely ignored.
Until there's a system in place other than "be famous and make noise," nobody should trust Google with their money, in any way.
Anyone who's interested in more back story (and my recommendations for improving the Google experience), these are the two articles I wrote:
If you really mean that they closed your husband's account and walked away with money they owed you, then this seems like exactly what the legal system is made for. (Though I'd expect them to settle rather than actually go to court, unless they think you're lying outright.)
Well, they seem to have come out $2000 ahead on this one. Perhaps they ran the math and realized "the legal system" was intimidating enough that to deter most who would be forced to look to it for help.
To clarify: I was not in the least suggesting that the fact that it might be possible to get your money back from Google by suing them means that Google haven't failed. I was suggesting that it might be a more effective way of getting them to take notice than going through their (clearly rather useless) support channels and blogging about it.
He lives in Austria. Which legal system? And even if it was in the US, you'd be very hard-pressed - as a professional - to justify going through the time and effort required, even in small claims court, for $2k.
For Google, it is a win/win/win situation... until people holler about it.
If you actually expected them to fight it all the way, that might be true. I suspect, though, that "Google found guilty of stealing customer's money" would be an unpalatable enough headline that they'd settle pretty quickly once the threat was made.
But yeah, not being in a country where Google has enough presence to bring them under its jurisdiction could be a problem.
That dude who was on the HuffPost, who sued them for his $700 in missing Adsense money... they fought him in small claims court, even tho their representative was unable to prove a case, they appealed and are dragging it out.
Given the hundreds of millions of users, tens of millions of webmasters, and many advertisers and publishers that Google interacts with, it would be difficult to have one-on-one conversations with all of them even if everyone at Google did nothing but try to provide that support.
Not saying it is easy or free to get there, but the same arguments can mostly be said for Microsoft and they seem to be doing pretty OK.
I've had excellent support from them, 24/7, on the phone, including weekends, where I've been assigned one person and one person only to fix some critical issues which had to be dealt with before monday 7am.
I have nothing but praise for the Microsoft support team. However just trying to find non-automated support for my google-services seems impossible.
I do realize Microsoft and google has different business models and don't mean to come off hostile, but Google upping their customer-service standards a little bit wouldn't hurt.
Your last sentence is dead-on. Microsoft ascribes to the traditional enterprise-y business model. The products work okay but often need support, and if you pay enough you get great support (and if you don't pay enough you get passable support). This has made them (and many other companies) a ton of money, but Google is absolutely killing all competition by following a very different path. It's hard to say how much of Google's success is due to their aversion to acting like a regular enterprise company, but I think it's safe to say they won't be drastically changing tack any time soon. The stories like this of people getting screwed are unfortunate - it's collateral damage.
Collateral damage? Well, then it appears Google's experiencing some blow back, and deservedly so. It shouldn't matter what trails your blazing, you can't leave your customers burning in the blaze behind you.
PayPal also grew this way, with collateral damage - until they were slapped with several class action lawsuits, which went through, and (I believe?) they ended up being at least partially classified as a bank. Or threatened with being classified as a bank. Something to that order.
In any event, they really had to clean up their act.
That's going to happen with Google, too, I would expect, and there's no way they are going to be surprised.
If you ask me, it's no different than a chemical manufacturing company deciding that it is more cost-effective to pay the EPA fines than to clean up their act. It's about pure numbers.
"Given the hundreds of millions of users" - I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support.
Tens of millions of webmasters - I would suggest that only a fraction of them would need to call customer support, same with the publishers and advertisers.
Banks also have millions of customers, just when the call center is busy, they are put on hold. I think the best investment that Google cam make right now is not to sacrifice customer service in order to get on with throwing stuff on the wall and see what sticks. Instead, just hire some recent grads to deal with people's issues. How much would that cost, lets say ten grads, 100k a month each, that's 1 million, a drop in the water as far as Google is concerned. The return on this investment on the other hand would be so great as people can then continue loving Google rather than suggest that Google is being evil.
"I doubt that anyone who is using Google for search purposes will need to contact customer support."
You'd be surprised. There's still some people who think that when they type in a query, people at Google manually decide which results to show. For every result on the page. For every query. Hundreds of millions of times a day.
A lot of those searchers do a search for "John Smith" and then want to talk about why their school friend John Smith wasn't #1 instead of that other John Smith.
That's doesn't negate your point; I'm just saying that orders of magnitude more people want to contact Google than there are Google employees, and many of those people want to have prolonged discussions with Google. So the challenge is to find scalable ways to communicate with those people.
I have heard answers of that nature coming from Google before. I think they are avoiding the question. Searchers? Fine. They are using a free, take it or leave it service. Almost anyone would understand that they will be shuffled in to some sort of 'scalable communication method.' Webmasters in your index? You have no commercial relationship with them. They may rely on Google. But there is still no real commercial relationship.
Adwords/Adsense customers/vendors? That is a different story. As I have mentioned several times on this topic, I have encountered shocking responses from Google regarding large ($100k+) accounts.
Google does not have that many customers & vendors.
Why not just charge $80/hour for support, and refund it for when people call in to fix false positives in the fraud detector? Seems like a win/win - make money off scammers trying to cheat you, and give people an easy way to re-enable their account.
I cannot stress how important this is! Matt, if you can give one thing to the AdSense team, let this be it. $100 a call, $80 an hour, whatever it may be. If I'm out $1000, I'll pay $100 to try and get it back (especially if I stand to lose $100 within a week of waiting). Snail customer support when it concerns accounts that hold money is not good.
Google makes billions even in a slow economy so it should be able to afford customer service for at least its paying customers.
There are tens of millions of Indians out there eager for such a job. This is a better opportunity for them than "outsourcing SEO services" where they mess up the Google index by low quality and high quantity "link building".
I couldn't agree more. Much smaller companies with much smaller capital have options to contact for support issues in a person to person basis. With Google Adwords, it is virtually non-existant. Considering the fact that you have to either really screw up or get a lot of attention to yourself for Google to get to you, without that you are out of luck.
Automated response is not a solution to all problems.
1. Google knows how to scale computers, and perhaps engineering teams, but not people in general.
2. "You make a hundred times what my bank does off me" - Exactly, and hiring pesky call center employees, who would have to be good on top of it, would ruin Google's profit/stock price.
We're all desperate, depending on practically the only ad game in town, so we bark but have no bite. A higher-end (aka non-cpc|cpm) revenue model is the only way out, I'm afraid.
I don't agree that costs throughout the system need to rise. If people want (or need) a higher level of support, they should be able to pay for it, preferably on a pay as you go model with refunds for genuine grievances.
there are other ad networks. uh, look at my other comments.
Personally, I think you are right that 'cost per click' and 'cost per impression' are both easy to game. The auction model, I think, might mean the beginning of a better way. Essentially, advertisers bid on what they are willing to pay per day. (now, personally, I think project wonderful's implementation is slightly flawed, but it is moving in the correct direction.)
No offense, but if it takes posting your gripes on HN to get customer support then something is very much broken.
The simple fact that a multiple billion dollar company should depend on outside channels for its support cues is very sad imho.
Maybe, instead of passing on messages like these pass the general message that Google tech support as perceived from the outside absolutely sucks.
I'm not exactly a newbie on the adsense/adwords front, have spent lots of money on adwords before giving up because of inactivity on googles part dealing with click fraud, still using adsense because of a lack of alternatives.
We're talking about a website that normally gets 100 page views per day. Are you saying that Google should hire thousands of full-time employees to service customers who each only account for ten or fifteen bucks worth of business a year?
If one percent of them call once in a year, why not?
I can call a toll-free number about the 1 dollar pack of gum I bought. I don't get stellar interaction but it is still more than what we are talking about.
Flip side: HN apparently expects that Apple should have enough people on staff to provide timely, professional support to developers whose apps might never sell as many as a hundred copies total.
What about the countless other people who can't cause a big PR fuss and therefore don't attract your attention? I'm not saying they're all innocent of ToS breaches, but neither are they all guilty, and Matt doesn't scale to look at each of these situations.
The Google search results are constantly being updated with new data and new algos because Google knows that to keep the SERPs relevant, they have to keep questioning their approach and improving on it. Why isn't the same healthy self-criticism of the AdSense termination process being portrayed in public? Every week we hear the same exact story, and it's now a regular feature in the headlines.
I guess you would make more webmasters happy besides yourself by making Google set up a team that deals with such issues where webmasters don't have to raise hell first to get noticed.
Maybe Google should hire the 10k "permanent temps" again it spit out a few months ago during the "financial crisis" panic.
On a side note, google should definitely get its act together related to customer service. I have heard so many horror stories about google's indifferent/insignificant customer service lately.
"I think I've saved $64 million since we started talking," replied Google.
Google, being founded and run by Comp Sci PhDs, wants to automate everything. Though they don't publicize it, they are practically an AI company. Unfortunately if the Google Corporation complaints division succeeds in this automation, the first words spoken by a strong AI probably won't be along the lines of "What hath God wrought", or "I am become the angel of death", but more like "Share and Enjoy".
"Share and Enjoy" is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.
The motto stands — or rather stood — in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young complaints executives — now deceased.
The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration. http://flag.blackened.net/dinsdale/dna/book2.html
On a side note, google should definitely get its act together related to customer service.
This implies that they're incompetent at providing customer service. My biggest fear is that this behavior is by design, that they are achieving all their customer service objectives, and that they have the metrics to prove it.
Yeah. Don't pay people to do customer service is still more profitable than losing a few customers a they are not many search and Adsense/Adwords alternatives that can really compete when it comes to reach.
That's walking a very tight rope as the way you put it sounds very much like monopolistic behavior. I would suggest that it does not make business sense to have the government looking over you as being an evil monster, which, is most probably what will occur if the horror stories continue.
There are plenty more like that. I've also noticed a tendency to adsense account holders to avoid talking about issues in public because this may 'rock the boat'.
especially in the instances where they've taken over companies that previously had, at the least, decent support.
in postini's web administration panel, there are certain actions that require you to contact support to be done. now that google owns them and you have to contact google, it's a long, painful process.
What's crap is that AdSense's TOS say that you can't run someone else's context- or content-sensitive ads. So you can't run both AdSense and whatever Yahoo/Bing/whoever has. If you could, stuff like this would be a great boon, not an automatic circuit breaker that cut you off.
My favorite term from the TOS is the one where they forbid you to talk about your accounts statistics:
" Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as "Confidential" or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority. "
That's definitely what it feels like. My main issue with this part of the TOS is this: Google is extremely lacking in transparency, the only way to puncture that is to team up with other publishers/advertisers and compare notes.
Right now the feeling is simply that you're being screwed and you can't even talk about that feeling or verify it.
At the risk of getting my adsense account blocked, and because I'm not going to let the big G muzzle me I'm going to post my adsense stats for July.
Hizook could have prevented losing advertising revenue (or at least reduced losses) by having a backup or parallel ad network on their site. So if not Google adsense, what's the next best game in town?
Has anyone ever fronted up to Google and ask to see some customer service there?
Over the past few months there have been a number of stories about Google's bad customer service particularly in relation to the AdSense/etc programs, so I'm curious if anyone has been brave/silly enough to try.
I know one of those cases personally and no, they're not 'brave/silly' enough to try because there appears to be some chance you get shut down completely if you become too vocal about support issues.
Unfortunately, the real problem here is that Google is a company that tries to be nice and pleasant to their users, but has to deal with unreasonable customers on a massive scale. In fact, not just unreasonable customers, but many who are actively attempting to systematically defraud them and their other customers.
So I think we can all agree that this was a pretty bad example. What are the best ways that others have found to handle things in similar situations without causing these kinds of scenarios?
I remember a comment at some point by pg that customer service might be Google's Achilles heel. The evidence is accumulating. Any service that cannot be provided without it cannot be provided by Google and there is an opportunity to compete.
Judging by how keen people are to share google customer service frustrations at any opportunity, I think this is evidence.
One has to understand that Adsense publishers are not clients for Google. There are millions of websites trying to get Adsense working for them, so Google here is the client.
Real clients of Google are Adwords advertisers, so these are the ones that they try to please. Anything that makes your site suspect will take you out of the network, and Google makes it very clear that they will do it first and ask questions later. I don't see this changing, because it is a really good assurance for advertisers.
Google doesn't have a phone support for Adwords either. That's another story, though. Google wouldn't have Adwords customers were it not for AdSense, so I think your point fails in that sense. Google "traps" your money, whether make legally or not, and you never see it again unless you manage to appeal "correctly." Furthermore, there is no proof whatsoever that Google returns all of that money to advertisers. I've never seen a trace of evidence they don't just mark that as profit.
It's because visitors from those sites are worthless. They may click on the ads, but they aren't going to buy anything and even if they do, the conversion rate is so low that the advertisers get mad at Google.
I fail to see how Google mispricing impressions is the fault of the Hizook admin.
Google already modifies the payout on clickthrough using a completely opaque system. If that system cannot handle traffic spikes, they shouldn't be defaulting to banning the Adsense account, they should just throttle inventory.
Google shoots first and doesn't ask questions later. I'm not defending google. I've been anti-google for years. I'm just saying why they disable the account. It's the easiest, automated solution to combat lots of problems like click-fraud, advertiser complaints, etc. If they don't disable the account, they have to constantly handle this type of account, the high traffic, potentially high click-thru, but low conversion attracting account.
The other solution requires making a lot of changes to a lot of accounts. The advertisers' ad positioning, the rates for the ads, which affect other adsense sites, etc. In that case, Google runs the risk of angering a lot of customers, both advertisers, and real estate providers.
The other solution: ban the account -- angers only one real estate provider.
That does not excuse Google's behavior in any way.
The most amazing to me is that it's now Thursday, and Google has not responded. Even if they don't like humans, they could have automatically detected by now that the traffic is due to the links.
Don't they have this thing called pagerank that computes exactly that? Another example of the left hand not talking to the right hand (and not caring).
There is nothing 'amazing' about it, unfortunately, Google tech support is from Mars. The only answers I have ever had to date were cut & paste emails which usually did not address the issue at all. We keep some of them for amusement value.
Adwords is not much better by the way, we've simply stopped using it after detecting some major discrepancies (read undetected click fraud) between googles reporting and our own log files.
Complaining is pretty much pointless, we no longer bother, possibly this experience is unique but I highly doubt it.
I guess some computer in googles database records that as 'customer satisfaction going up', but in fact it is the opposite and if I ever come across a real alternative to adwords/adsense we will be gone in a heartbeat.
Sure, but Google knows more about those visitors than anyone, by tracking them across many AdSense sites. They can take referrer and temporary traffic surges into account on what ads -- if any -- they serve.
That Google has no adjustment to apply here other than banning an account -- especially given how many total crap sites thrive on AdSense month after month without triggering countermeasures -- is disappointing.
It would be nice to see some data to back up this claim. Is there some study or some data from store owners available anywhere that could confirm this?
Although I am sympathetic to everyone's disgruntlement with Google over the adsense and adwords programs, it makes for very boring news for the rest of us unconcerned with revenue streams derived that way.
This is a well known issue with the so called Digg effect. I warned people years ago not to aim for Digg traffic because Adsense tracks page impressions and click throughs and Digg users behave like robots, flooding a site with requests and bouncing off right away.
[edit:] Reddit is even worse, higher bouncer rate (95%+), and even lower engagement than Digg.
That is one of those empty, formulaic phrases that mean the exact opposite of what they say. Like when a company says for your convenience which really means for this company's convenience or more commonly we're about to make things harder for you.
These formulaic phrases are spit out by the form letter generator and have no meaning.
It seems like some lame automatic anti-fraud (too successful SEO) trigger at google, based entirely on statistics (like high-speed stock trading, etc.)
Those people had their top moment, but google spoiled their bonuses.
just be grateful that messrs. brin and page allowed you the privilege, for as such a brief period as it were, to make a meager pittance from these text and/or image based advertisements.
If only Get Satisfaction could get the Google account. . .. Perhaps Google should acquire them; that would likely solve the customer service issues people seem to be so upset about.
1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.
2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.
The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.