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Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

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Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#151

Post by pdonis »

jefftk wrote: post #99
ent101 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be the closest person on this thread who can answer questions about Google. Can you please tell us why Google summarily suspends accounts? Why is there absolutely no way to talk to a human being?

I can't speak for Google, and I don't work in that part of ads, but my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is. If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.

> my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is.

Let me rephrase this to make it clearer what the actual issue is: it's primarily because the cost to Google of false negatives on fraud detection (failing to detect actual frauds) is much higher than the cost to Google of false positives on fraud detection (flagging users as fraudulent that actually aren't). So Google is willing to accept a large number of false positives in order to avoid false negatives.

Or, to put it more simply: the incentive structure of what Google has chosen as its core business model means it is in Google's interest to randomly penalize a large number of bona fide users simply because a much smaller number of users are fraudulent.

In other words, this is basically unfixable unless Google changes its core business model.

See the problem?

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#152

Post by pdonis »

grog454 wrote: post #104
jefftk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Google, and I don't work in that part of ads, but my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is. If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.

>If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't really buy this. The most effective adversaries already have a deep understanding of detection mechanisms and are typically just tweaking parameters to find thresholds of detection. Other companies mitigate this by…

> adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference

I'm not sure that's true. Adversaries know they are intentionally trying to game Google's system, but that is not the same as knowing all of the internal parameters of Google's system. Telling them what they did wrong in specific cases might well give them useful additional information about those internal parameters that Google does not want to give them.

> False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.

While this is true, it is also not actionable, since the whole point is that Google does not know which positives are false positives and has no cost-effective way of finding out (since finding out would require actual humans and the scale of its ad business is too large to make the number of humans that would be required affordable).

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#153

Post by chowells »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #148
chowells wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think your new product deserves customer awareness? Why is it so important to impose yourself upon the awareness of others? How is doing that with a goal of acquiring money even slightly morally acceptable?

If I figured out how to do something for $1 and it provides $3 worth of utility, how is it immoral to pay some money to inform people so they can get that $2 of extra utility in their lives by making that trade? As far as I’m concerned, stopping me from running that ad is morally equivalent to destroying the mail sorting machines at USPS.

You don't need advertising if you have a useful product. You only need discoverability.

Advertising is an industry of mental pollution. It exists explicitly to convincing people they need to buy a product. If they don't know they need to buy it without being convinced, they don't actually need to buy it.

It is literally not worth $2 to me to have your junk injected into my brain. This isn't personal of course. I don't even know how useless your junk is. But the fact is, if you're selling a thing, I don't need it. I have more things than I need. I need less. I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things. And that's not even getting into the real issues with advertising.

Advertising is a lot more than your argument claims. It isn't just notification of a product's existence. Advertising is specifically convincing people to buy your thing. Maybe informing people of your product's existence will get some sales. But you'll get a lot more sales if you convince people they want your product. And you'll succeed at that a lot more easily if you attack statistical psychological weaknesses than if you just list product features. This isn't an accident, and it isn't going off the rails. It's what advertising will always become, because it's effective.

Your argument is along the lines of "well I won't abuse it." That's completely irrelevant, unless you're the only person allowed to advertise in the whole world. It really doesn't matter what your goals are. It matters what the effect of the policies you recommend are, and advertising has well-documented negative societal impact. As long as you don't engage with the actual problems with advertising in your arguments, your arguments aren't addressing my point.

If you actually want to address my point, tell me how you can fix the negative societal impact while still allowing advertising.

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#154

Post by sideshowb »

pdonis wrote: post #152
grog454 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't really buy this. The most effective adversaries already have a deep understanding of detection mechanisms and are typically just tweaking parameters to find thresholds of detection. Other companies mitigate this by…

> adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference I'm not sure that's true. Adversaries know they are intentionally trying to game Google's system, but that is not the same as knowing all of the internal parameters of Google's system. Telling them what they did wrong in specific cases might well give them useful additional information about those internal parameters th…

I don't for a moment believe Google couldn't afford to pay more humans. Do you?

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#155

Post by throwaway0305 »

You are not allowed to promote websites with someone else's brand name. The site you were promoting was a trademark violation and Google Ads took it down correctly. The trigger may also be the food delivery company complaining legally about your ads to Google.

Create your own site eg my-free-food-coupons.de and then run the ads.

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#156

Post by mpol »

tomcam wrote: post #146
f1refly wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just get you issue to the front page of hacker news, if you can't make it fuck off" is not a valid support strategy for one of the biggest corporations in the worls

Would you prefer nothing to happen? In the real world, we have two bad choices: either google ignores it completely, which I’m certainly not defending, or some of its employees try to make good. Why punish people for doing the right thing? Of course I think their support is generally reprehensible. But we don’t have a third choice right now, so these employees taking initiative seems like a win.

Or maybe it's part of their strategy? Remember, Google is an advertising agency.

They are sending a message out that their support is maybe not 100% adequate, but if you do have an issue, just raise your voice on social media and it will be fixed. In the end everything will turn out allright, not?

The message they are sending out is downright misleading. Maybe we should even say no to that.

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#157

Post by afarviral »

dollar wrote: post #28

The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway. Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance. We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives…

This sounds fictional, but if not I hope you do find someone who can escalate that internally.

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#158

Post by cobbzilla »

dollar wrote: post #28

The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway. Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance. We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives…

“The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway.”

Sure, but that’s not what’s happening here. You don’t pay your customers, you pay your vendors.

Treating your vendors like crap is a widely accepted corporate practice.

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#159

Post by raverbashing »

jefftk wrote: post #99
ent101 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be the closest person on this thread who can answer questions about Google. Can you please tell us why Google summarily suspends accounts? Why is there absolutely no way to talk to a human being?

I can't speak for Google, and I don't work in that part of ads, but my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is. If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.

> I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.

Google does not know how to fix this because they don't think outside of the tech box. This is very much an issue with their way of doing things.

You build relations with advertisers. If someone is spending 20k per day on your system (for months or even years), you better have someone to talk to and actually look at the issues they have.

"Do things that do not scale" as PG says.

Re: Google Ads suspended me and turned a deaf ear

#160

Post by hogrider »

goldcd wrote: post #19

Was just pondering if you could unionize (in a very loose way). Come up with your own set of rules that come within google's, peer review each other to ensure that you meet your own rules - then if google pulls one of you, the rest of you walk. Don't have to shift how google works, just present to google as a large enough mass of money that you get promoted to a service rep, rather than templated rules and emails. Th…

Cool idea but you'd still need to have the GDP of a small nation for them to care.
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