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A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

blog.lawnstarter.com

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#31

It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money. It's common knowledge that they can close your advertiser's profile, lock the money and you won't be able to reach them about it. But at the same time, nobody is making a lot of noise about it, although it is a multi-billion dollar company and it is the product that they make most of their money from. Most of B2B…

Google adwords is not for small advertisers. Period. It may work fine if you spend millions of dollars or if you have so much time and experience in your hands that losing money is not a problem, but it doesn't work for the general population.

My experience is very much the opposite. Large companies tend to overspend on adwords due to agency interference, ignorance, apathy, and organizational dysfunction.

Small businesses, like doctors, for example, can make a mint with AdWords. If you sell the right kind of product, it works exceedingly well even at tiny scales.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#32
Is this really level of flailing emotion people bring to their customer service interactions?

"It's just super frustrating because we spend like $300/day!"

How about: "We have been spending $300/day, and an error on Google's part means we are not being provided the service we are paying for. We need to know that this is fixed and then will need to discuss our past spend with someone who can act on crediting our account. Here's how we can replicate the problem."

You aren't their buddy. You are not asking for a "solid." You are a business owner, not some tweener boy that smudged their new white kicks.

"you can also just search it now. it's still screwed up."

Own the facts and deliver them without emotional loading. "Screwed up" is inaccurate and unprofessional - whiney in context with the "super frustrated" quip above.

"You can also just..." leaves room for a different set of facts.

Give a detailed description of the path you took and the results. If the results aren't obviously incorrect, define that issue. Repeat the desired outcome.

And, if you have "a meeting" and can't get the issue resolved, then you should have someone else make the call who can grind it out or schedule abundant time for dealing with this - or maybe $300/day and the previous spend isn't all that much and you should just walk away from AdWords...

You'd be better off penning blog articles that break down perfect grass types and pros/cons of various herbicides for the locality of McLean than crapping investor cash on advertising in the unseen margins of the search results.

Lawn care is definitely a word of mouth and signs in green yard growth business. I'd ask neighbors before trusting anyone who pays for AdWords, because my bill for lawn care pays for those AdWords and a good lawn care company doesn't need ads.

Most every service I've courted that does big ad spends on Google charges more for the same or worse service than other providers.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#33
post #29

It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money. It's common knowledge that they can close your advertiser's profile, lock the money and you won't be able to reach them about it. But at the same time, nobody is making a lot of noise about it, although it is a multi-billion dollar company and it is the product that they make most of their money from. Most of B2B…

>It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money In what way was the support inadequate with regards to this article? It seems to me Google responded pretty quickly and resolved this persons issue.

I guess "resolved" is in the eye of the beholder, considering Google's mistake still cost them thousands of dollars that as yet remains unrefunded.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#34
post #33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money In what way was the support inadequate with regards to this article? It seems to me Google responded pretty quickly and resolved this persons issue.

I guess "resolved" is in the eye of the beholder, considering Google's mistake still cost them thousands of dollars that as yet remains unrefunded.

Of course, Google should refund the money. But the support team didn't cause the mistake. My comment was to understand why the poster felt the support was inadequate.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#35

It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money. It's common knowledge that they can close your advertiser's profile, lock the money and you won't be able to reach them about it. But at the same time, nobody is making a lot of noise about it, although it is a multi-billion dollar company and it is the product that they make most of their money from. Most of B2B…

Google adwords is not for small advertisers. Period. It may work fine if you spend millions of dollars or if you have so much time and experience in your hands that losing money is not a problem, but it doesn't work for the general population.

We find Google adwords an invaluable way of backing up our TV ad campaigns and we are a fairly small start up. I've spoken to a number of Google reps and they were all really bothered about making sure that as a small business we were able to get up and running quickly because they "know we don't have a big ad department" - so from my experience, Google absolutely wants small businesses using them.

Thinking about it, with Google's push to make you add your business location to maps etc they are really starting to compete with the Yellow Pages which was/is basically 100% small to medium businesses - I guess it's a market where the combined long tail is much bigger than the big players.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#36
post #34
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess "resolved" is in the eye of the beholder, considering Google's mistake still cost them thousands of dollars that as yet remains unrefunded.

Of course, Google should refund the money. But the support team didn't cause the mistake. My comment was to understand why the poster felt the support was inadequate.

Agreed. Also, explicitly asking for a refund might yield some results in this regard.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#38
post #2

Well this is unfortunate. I would have expected Google to credit your account accordingly, though. A couple of years ago, we noticed massive automated click fraud that Google's fraud detection algorithms didn't seem to catch (which was kind of strange since all the clicks came from the same IP). However, after sending over some HTTP logs to Google, they removed all the invalid clicks from our account within a day or…

But how much should they be refunded? How should the average Adwords advertiser know how long the error was up there for?

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#39

It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money. It's common knowledge that they can close your advertiser's profile, lock the money and you won't be able to reach them about it. But at the same time, nobody is making a lot of noise about it, although it is a multi-billion dollar company and it is the product that they make most of their money from. Most of B2B…

I guess they don't want to open the floodgates to all the support queries they would get. But it is most frustrating as if one is dealing with the "computer says no" travel agent from Little Britain.

This has always bothered me. People always say that Twitter and Google can't offer real support because they would be able to handle the number of incoming requests.

But that's exactly what companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart do every day. For crying out loud, even Comcast (COMCAST!) has better support than Google or Twitter for their paid products.

Re: A Google Adwords Bug That Cost Us

#40

It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money. It's common knowledge that they can close your advertiser's profile, lock the money and you won't be able to reach them about it. But at the same time, nobody is making a lot of noise about it, although it is a multi-billion dollar company and it is the product that they make most of their money from. Most of B2B…

Google support is terrible, but they get away with it because they are a near monopoly in on online advertising.

What blows my mind is people that know how bad Google support can be, and they still build their business around Google services (Google Apps for Business, Cloud Computing, Google Wallet, etc). Amazon, Rackspace and many others aren't much more expensive and you get world-class customer service.

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