Diorex

It has been so long since I have had a new account at Google, that I have not had to deal with many of the day to day hassles that many new marketers have to deal with. My team starts a new account, or a new ad group or make some changes and they get approved immediately, for as bad as my customer support level is compared to my spend it is world’s better than what the average marketer is getting.

Recently, I had an idea that led to us starting a test that produced low volumes of very high converting keywords at CPCs about 10% of what we normally pay because there is virtually no competition for those ads. It is worth high 5 figures annually to us, worth bending over and picking up, but not a home run. For most starting advertisers it would be a gold mine.

I took a look at the idea and realized it should work for other really long tail stuff outside of our particular niche and with the extraordianrily low CPCs I could probably make it work on standard affiliate commission payouts and maybe make some real money by automating and scaling it.

So I fired up a brand new Google account, paid my $5 and then uploaded a bunch of keywords as a test. Got an initial burst of traffic, then had the ads frozen by Google. I have seen this before, it typically means the ads are under review. So I did not panic, and waited.

3 weeks later, the account has not gotten a single impression since the first day.

I know google’s rules better than they do, all my ads are fully compliant, I am in programs that allow me to use search etc etc. My ad quality score is 8 or 9 across the board with a very few 7’s and nothing lower. I am not doing anything other than what Google wants advertisers to do - bid on keywords that are specific to the product and land customers on relevant pages about that product.

I can almost certainly get this fixed with a single phone call linking this account to my corporate ones, but since this is a side project I am hesitant to do so.

This post is not really about the fact that this is not working - it is that I know I have jumped through Google’s hoops and it is not working. I can only imagine how many countless plumbers or lawyers or affiliate marketers have been through this same process. Go to the trouble to create a website, open a google account and then have nothing happen and conclude that internet marketing does not work.

Internet marketing does work and those plumbers and lawyers should not be discouraged because Google has a screwed up ad system that they themselves dont understand. I sent a concise description of the problem to Google support thinking maybe I fell through some crack - the response I got back was - SURPRISE a canned response to a question I did not ask which told me to go to a page that was full of useless and vague information - fortune cookies are more specific.

I have done some searches and looked at some forums, and this seems to be a fairly common occurrence. I am having a hard time understanding how a company basically refuses to accept advertisers money?

Once again I know I can get it fixed because of my other activities but should I have to spend millions to get it fixed? How many profitable campaigns to Google and advertisers never get any traction? How much revenue is Google leaving on the table a few hundred dollars a month at a time?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 2:45 am and is filed under Google, Personal Stuff, Rants, paid search. 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.