I'm having some difficulty with one of my Adwords campaigns. After being online for 4 months, and having just begun going profitable, Google raised the minimum bids to $10.00 from $.05-$.50. It looks like there was a technical glitch in the linking that may have caused the problem, but I won't be able to tell until Google crawls it again.

Well, when this happened, I emailed Google support. It truly amazed me at the incompetence of the support personnel. After waiting 5 days for their response (they say on their web site it is usually within one business day), I received a generic email pointing me to the help area in Adwords. It was obvious they had never even looked at the site.

I responded by asking for a more specific answer to the problem. They came back with a detailed analysis that Google didn't like the business model because this was a review site. Of course there are thousands of review sites using Adwords all over the Internet. This might cause a small increase, but shouldn't cause this kind of slam.

I responded by focusing on some specifics of his answer. Then it got complicated. The person that was handling my case got sick and they moved it to two others. The first told me I didn't have a positive ROI, and didn't see that I had not enabled conversion tracking. He later emailed back and apologized. A complete waste of time.

Then I received an email from another support person who told me that I hadn't included my billing information, and that is why the ads weren't showing. I responded with an email that explained I had already spent $3000.00 over the last 4 months, and that most of my campaigns are running just fine. I can't wait until I see her response.

In over a decade on the internet and 2 decades working with computers, I have seen some bad support. This may well be the worst ever. One would think a company the size of Google would hire people that were basically competent. I'm sure there will be more to come on this debacle.

Friday, April 11, 2008 8:20:46 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  web businesses