Diorex

Yesterday afternoon around 4:00, I noticed that the ads for one of my verticals were not appearing.

I quickly checked 4-5 other keywords for that account and saw that none of them were showing. I then logged into the adwords interface and went to the diagnostic tool. It told me my ads were not displaying due to budget restrictions.

I looked at the daily budgets for my campaigns and none of them were even at 1/2 of authorized daily spend. Regardless I changed daily budget to $50,000 per day for each campaign. That did not resolve the issue, despite the very clear statement stating that a higher budget would re-activate my ads.

I then got a CSR on the phone (new account, does not yet qualify for a dedicated rep, despite spending almost $500,000 in 2 months….name another company anywhere in the world where a new advertiser could appear overnight, and be on pace to spend $3 million annually and not have an account rep..ok,ok Yahoo…GRRRR) and was told that everything looked fine with my account and that there were no problems.

I tried to calmly explain that there were some very obvious problems since my ads were being prohibited from being displayed. I got a response which basically said, hopefully it will fix itself quickly, but I will escalate the issue nevertheless. Half assed admitting there was a problem, but never fear it will probably work itself out. Meanwhile I am not earning the $500+ an hour this account makes us.

At 12:01 this morning, the ads magically began to appear again. So I called Google trying to be helpful and let them know that there might be a budgeting bug on their end and to ask them to verify that there was not an internal budget on my account. The response this morning was “I see you spoke with XYZ last night and I am sure that person is working diligently on the issue and will email you when the issue is resolved.” I said I had not heard back and she said, then the issue has either been resolved internally or they are still working on it.

The woman I spoke with seemed wholly unable to consider anything remotely outside the box like for some reasons a budget trigger was being misapplied. Her response was that since my ads were currently showing, obviously there was not a problem.

Come on Google, understand who it is paying the bills. I am paying you more than I proft, so in many ways my activity is more profitable for you than it is for me. I am sick of talking to reps who clearly do not comprehend the way your own system works, and what is worse they talk to meet as if they are the expert and I am some moron who tripped into search marketing.

I know that if this had been on one of our established primary accounts rather than on a “test vertical”, that I could have spoken with my rep and this would have been fixed in a matter of minutes. This is not the first (and unfortunately likely not the last time) that I have seen the 2 worlds of Google. The pre-IPO geniuses who get it and the post-IPO employees who are seat fillers.

Update: Now I am hot. They did it again. At almost the exact same spending level as yesterday. half way through the day and they just shut off my accounts. Already spoken with them and they are awfully sorry about the trouble but have no answers to my questions. We will have to escalate the issue and get back to you. Of course everything will be fine at midnight, so it will then be de-escalated. I asked to speak with a supervisor and was told one would call me back within 48 hours!!!

I used to absolutely love everything Google. Anymore, they are a complete and total pain in the ass to work with. If there was any way to cut them out of the process I would do it in an instant. They are arrogant. They are ignorant. They are incompetent. I am trying to spend more money and yet they will not let me do so. ARGHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 11:55 am and is filed under Google, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.