Last week, I had an opportunity to talk with Andy Brice, who sells software for wedding seating plans and the like. He is an absolute genius with AdWords, and gave me some ideas on ways to improve my performance. I immediately started to implement them, full with the excitement of a new project and wondering why I don’t spend more time optimizing AdWords.
Oh, right.
There were another 15 ads which I added last Friday-ish and are still Under Review. Under Review is Google-speak for “We aren’t sure that this ad complies with our policies yet.” While an ad is Under Review, it doesn’t show anywhere, and you aren’t learning anything by having it.
Dealing With Shades of Grey
Google has a variety of businesses which it does not want to or legally cannot do business with. To prevent them from using AdWords, they exercise prior restraint on AdWords copy, not letting their ads run until a human at Google has approved them.
One of the businesses that Google doesn’t want advertising (in the US, at any rate) is gambling. Bingo is a form of gambling. Bingo Card Creator is not a form of gambling — it is a form of software which helps elementary schoolkids learn to read. This makes it rather hard to write focused, relevant advertisements responsive to customer queries like [how do I make a US presidents bingo card] which sell Bingo Card Creator without using the word “bingo” anywhere.
Google is, to all appearances, just using a keyword-based blacklist. I guess all the eats-Bayesian-classifiers-for-lunch PhDs work in search and Gmail spam filtering, where they’ve clearly got an aptitude for understanding that words can have multiple meanings. OK, fine, but at least the remaining boffins can do a blacklist correctly?
Well, not so much.
- Using Google’s Copy Ad feature to copy an ad, word for word, between ad groups will cause the new copy to go back into review purgatory. This is despite that theoretically being a content-neutral action and a core task for advertisers, because many flavors of AdWords optimization rely on keywords being partitioned correctly into focused ad groups.
- Changing so much as a character of the ad, including landing page URLs, will cause the ad to get flagged again. This only affects good advertisers. Bad advertisers can presumably figure out how to serve whatever content they want on http://example.com/approved . Pulling a bait-and-switch is absolutely trivial, since you have full control over what your own server serves to users. This rule only inconveniences compliant advertisers, who get thrown into review purgatory every time they e.g. try to add another tracking parameter to their landing pages, switch from http:// to https://, etc etc. I get the feeling I’m supposed to create five copies of each ad, pointing to /lp1 … /lp5 with identical content, and then if I need to do any testing I should get crafty with redirects or what have you later. That’s insane - it is extra work that is directly against the spirit of the rules and unlike actual compliance it works.
Scalable Communication Methods
According to Google:
We review all ads in the order they’re received, and we work to review all ads in our program as quickly as possible, usually within 1 to 2 business days or sooner.
If there were only 48 hours of lag time inserted every time I touched an AdWords ad, this would be annoying but tractable. It would lengthen my time through the idea creation/validation loop (Lean Startup fans know why that is a Very Bad Thing), but I could still get work done by batching all my edits together and then twiddling my thumbs for 48 hours.
Sadly, Google routinely falls short of their announced level of service. And when I say “Falls short”, I mean “Ads can sit for weeks ‘Under Review’ and never be approved.”
This leads you to have to contact Google Customer Service to be able to get Google to give permission to give Google money.
Google Customer Service: Welcome to Kafka
The first rule of Google Customer Service is that Google does not have Customer Service. They prefer what Chief Engineer Matt Cutts describes as “scalable communication methods”: there are like a bazillion of you, there are only a few tens of thousands of us, instead of actually speaking to a human being you should read a blog post or watch a video or talk to a machine. It is a wonderful, scalable model… when things work.
Anything which introduces a mandatory customer service interaction with Google is a process designed for failure. AdWords approvals requires a customer service interaction. Catch-22, to mix literary metaphors.
The “scalable communication methods” like AdWords Help have this to say about contacting customer service with regards to ad approvals:
Our Support team won’t be able to help you expedite this process.
That is not actually a true statement (which, incidentally, describes much of AdWords Help). Length of time from ad submission to approval is, in my experiences, unbounded (literally, weeks can go by without approval). Length of time from complaining to Support to approval: a day or two. The most helpful Google employee I’ve ever Internet-met (name withheld to protect him from whatever dire punishments await someone who attempts to help customers) told me that my workflow should literally be 1) Submit ad 2) Submit ticket to get ad looked at, if I persistently fell into Under Review.
Google apparently knows it, too, since they have special-cased out the CS interaction for dealing with Ad approvals:
After filling in everything, I hit Submit expecting to be taken to a page which had an “OK, now actually tell us what the problem” comment box was. No need — it has been optimized away! Google doesn’t even want that much interaction. (The last time I went through this — sometime last year — I recall there being a freeform field, limited to 512 characters or so. I always use it to explain that I am not a gambling operation and if they want confirmation they can read the AdWords case study about my business.)
Google’s computers then weighed my support request and found it wanting:
Dear Advertiser,
Thank you for your e-mail. We understand you’d like us to review your ad.
When you submit new ads or make changes to existing ads, they’re
automatically submitted for review.
We work to review all ads in our program as quickly as possible. You
should receive an email notification stating the approval status of your
ads pending review within the next 3 business days. You can view the
status of your ad any time in your account. The “Status” column in the
“Ads” tab displays information on the current state of an individual ad
variation.
For a list of Ad Approval Statuses, visit
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138186
We are working as quickly as possible to get everyone up and running and
should get to yours soon! If you have a different question, which doesn’t
refer to pending ad approval, please get back to us via the ‘Contact Us’
link in the Help Center at https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/?hl=en.
Be sure to choose the category that is most relevant to your question.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
Well, at least the templating engine correctly replaced $BRUSHOFF_LETTER, but in terms of customer communication:
- You asked me to put in my name… you might want to think about using it.
- As much as I appreciate your False! Enthusiasm! if the next line of your letter is going to be Eff Off And Die then maybe you should take out the exclamation points and give them to a Ruby programmer. (We can always use more.)
- If the original timeline was 1-2 business days and the timeline three days later is “within 3 business days”, can we update them so that they quote it consistently? Or maybe put something like “We get to 98.2% of approvals within 3 business days.” (Or 2.89% of approvals within 3 business days, as the case may be.)
Google’s Isolation From Market / Customer Pressure
Google theoretically values my business — I pay them $10,000 a year and would love to pay more. Indeed, they can find my email address and have a human contact it when they want to do ad sales. (I got an offer recently to set up a call with one of their AdWords Strategists to discuss optimization of my account… which is great, but previous experience leads me to believe he would use the same reports I have access to, make decisions with little understanding of my business, and then leave it to me to actually schedule the new ads/keywords and run headlong into Pending Review purgatory.) But they are not doing very well lately at convincing me they actually care. And they’ll still make a bazillion dollars without that, so no harm done.
In normal markets, I would be strongly tempted to take my business to vibrant competitive offerings. Sadly, Google is pretty much the only game in town for viable CPC advertising: even if Microsoft/Yahoo exorcized the abominations haunting their UIs, they would not have enough inventory to matter for me in my niche (I’ve tried before).
Which leaves me with only one option: trying out my own scalable communication methods, and hoping someone in the Googleplex reads this and takes action to unbork this process (ideally, for a large class of advertisers). It is the Internet equivalent of putting a message in a bottle and then throwing it into the ocean, but that is still an improvement on the normal channels.
If there were a website dedicated to these sorts of complaints combined with a petition, I think that’s the only hope that Google would actually change. I come across so many of these stories on a weekly basis. Individually, Google won’t care and won’t change. However, in aggregate and with enough PR backing, it becomes a nightmare for them. I’d enjoy discussing this with you.
Superb article. Thanks for sharing.
If you think adwords customer support is slow and inhuman, then you should try adsense support – it’s 100% “inhuman” :(
I’d sign that petition…
Great article. Well said.
Right before I read this post I was literally cursing at my monitor about a new ad I wanted to test that has be in “under review” purgatory (some may call it hell…) since last Thursday. The lengthy ad review process has really impacted my ability to do iterative conversion testing…
Agreed, Google support does not exist. When I had a problem with a report on Google Checkout, I got the worst form letter in response. Completely useless, and they had the balls to send a survey to follow up about how well they’ve done.
Have you noticed how Google and Apple business UIs are horrible while their “public” front-ends are close to perfect? iTunes Connect doesn’t even work in Chrome!
Been there, done that. I’ve experienced the same “service” dealing with Adwords, Google Apps and Adsense. Feels like dealing with the same person or, more realistically, robot.
The most ironic part is that you can get occasional ‘Are you interested in a free consultation for your Google AdWords account’ emails from Adwords team about the same time you have a case open.
Why no mention of using Facebook ads instead?
FB gets those CPM ads running promptly — plus, you can target teachers by specifying a workplace in your settings when setting up your ads.
I hate Adwords. They sent me a disapproval for an ad I ran so many moons ago that I’d forgotten I ran them.
1-866-4-GOOGLE is your friend. I never use the email support. Call that number and you will get a real English speaking American person. If they can’t help you on the phone they will follow up by email within 24 hours.
Google needs to create a “trusted advertiser” program, similar to the US/Canada Customs NEXUS “trusted traveller” program that expedites border crossings.
Good advertisers like Patrick who want to give Google money should be able to qualify, by passing some threshold level of $$ ($1k?) and some level of scrutiny by a human. After that point, the default should be to approve ads ( with random spot-checks). The increase in ad revenue from happy advertisers who are now “trusted/preferred” would be significant. And once advertisers achieve this status, they would be careful to preserve it, for fear of being sent back to Ad-Review he’ll forever.
— David Jones
Very interesting, I guess that google will have problems in europe for things like this. In some countries there are rules you must follow for doing bussiness and customer service is one of this.
Even if the Google filters let you pass, would people click on your ads only to find out that “Bingo Card Creator is not a form of gambling — it is a form of software which helps elementary schoolkids learn to read.” Many may hope they discovered a new Bingo site. Meaning, once you use the word Bingo in your ad, aren’t people already on the wrong track? Maybe Google is actually helping you there.
Stephan
Last time I changed my ads, it took about 2 weeks to get approved… Insane, indeed, but they call it monopoly..
This post is dead on.
In case you thought your customer experience was tied to your ad spend, rest assured, their act is no more together for those of us spending $500K/year with them.
Customer Service is not a software problem, Google needs to invest in some humans.
Stephan: Google is most certainly not helping Patrick by holding his ads. If I understand correctly, he doesn’t advertise on generic terms such as “bingo”, but niche terms such as “make bingo cards”, “halloween bingo cards”, and “famous volcanoes bingo” – terms which most likely are not used by bingoholics looking for a quick fix online…
Google does have good adwords support, and answers the phone quickly.
If you have an adwords question here’s the digits 866-246-6453
Great article, Patrick. I’ve been through exactly the same frustrations with slow ad reviews and inconsistent communication from Google customer support and you’ve summed up the whole experience perfectly.
“I would be strongly tempted to take my business to vibrant competitive offerings. Sadly, Google is pretty much the only game in town”
There’s got to be a way to change that – at least to come up with an Adsense competitor.
Have you tried facebook yet. Perhaps direct at teachers.
It does look like they are making efforts to talk to smbs with more vigor. I have gotten a handful of calls over the past month looking to give setup advice and feedback, something just 2 years ago would have been unthinkable from G. With Mayer moving to local and boost and tags rolling out I hope they are ready to ramp up customer service. There was a story floating around that G had 300 Boost/Tags sales reps in Mountain View, I would hope that they also leveraged these people as support after the sale in some fashion.
While G hasn’t been in the front of customer service over the years these are some promising signs that they are starting to notice the market signals and soapbox sentiment. I wish them luck, supporting adwords and teaching the average business owner the differences between NSO and SEM are not for the weary.
You would also think that when you have a campaign in Romanian, targeted to customers in Romania (speaking Romanian) Google would not put your ads under review for manual approval because they contain a Romanian word which unfortunately has a bad meaning in English.
It happens to me every time one ad contains the word ‘c*m’ (which means ‘how’ in Romanian). So if I don’t want to delay the ads for days or more I have to rephrase around this problem.
I’m just about to dive in the mad world of Adwords, so this article was very useful!
Sounds annoying. Did you get anywhere with the phone numbers provided?
I certainly agree with the entirity of this blog post. I also recently received an email from Google telling me to call a phone number and speak to a “conversion specialist”. I called the number to be faced with 3 options, none of which related to what I was calling about. When I finally got through to somebody he told me I had called the wrong number and then proceeded to tell me to call the number I had just rang. When I questioned him he got abusive and told me I was stupid, laughed at me, and told me to learn to use a phone! Hah – great customer service!
On the other hand, I’ve had numerous interactions with Microsoft’s adCenter support. Mostly because of an issue with their user interface that caused all of my ads to be set to target english/spanish speakers from only US channels (I was trying to target users in the UK!). however, Microsoft rang me (!) talked me through the problem, fixed the problem for me, emailed me when the problem was fixed and my ads were displaying, then went on to analyse my campaign, provide me with a list of suggestions and then implemented for me (!) the ones I said looked like they’d help! That’s amazing customer service – Google take note!
It’s such a shame that Bing ad impressions/CTR’s are so poor at the moment, else I might switch from Google Ads completely. Mayeb when they integrate their ads into Yahoo search things might start to change!
Anyway, great article – keep it up!
“The first rule of Google Customer Service is that Google does not have Customer Service”
LOL!
How about using ThePoint.com (which spawned Groupon) to set up a one week or one month boycott of Adwords. I bet their algorithms would notice a decrease in ad revenue for just a few days or a week.
With ThePoint.com (as in “The tipping point”) you could say “if we get to X kSignups then we’ll all boycott it for a day or a week, etc.
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