Google says, No Soup for You!

I gave up on Adwords a long time ago. It does seem to me that a lot of people get banned without knowing why they got banned. The more customers they cull out, the bigger share of advertising bucks will go to their arch rival, Facebook.

1.3% of Adwords clients account for 99% of Adwords income. (According to Google). Most of the costs associated with Adwords are generated by the 98.7%. If they banned that 98.7% they would save billions in expenses and it would only cost them 1% of income in that department. It is like marketers not willing to burn CDs for the few clients on dial-up. To them, it doesn't make good business sense. I suspect the banning will continue and increase. (I know of one Adwords client spending 1 million a month who was banned. That much is not in the top 2% of users). It is actually a bad business decision to NOT ban most users when the stats are that weighted. (usually the expected is 80/20 or 95/5)

I am working with a person now who seems to be slammed out in the cold holding his / her soup cup in the chilly outcast winds of current times.

It is a hard call, but i have never understood who made this call at G, it would have been much better to set a q score = 0 and just not show ads that do not meet guidelines than go around slamming fingers in doors.

Mostly i have seen only the good intended but those perhaps not sure of the rules get hurt, the bigger people seem to just open new accounts anyway.

what they are doing is fine stopping all of the crap ads, that is good business that will make them more moving forward than running crap, for this reason that when people search they want to find and G seems very good at that, and yes removing shady crap is good as well.

It's just this ban part that seems like a funny idea, it seems to make more problems than fix problems, most people do want to abide by the rules, stopping any ads from running until fixed would see people learn fast or go with out / no sales.

What I've noticed is that more and more of their support seems to be handled by guys that have no clue (the last few guys I talked to I'm pretty sure were overseas workers) and aren't trained all that well.

When you ask for clarification, they'll give cut and paste replies that aren't even related to the question.

A couple years ago, this wasn't the case, as guys who spent a decent amount on Adwords could easily get ahold of someone there that was way more helpful.

But having said that, the larger advertisers are spending millions upon millions a month with them each month each individually, so from a business standpoint, they'd have an incentive to get rid of the smaller advertisers.

I also think that they're trying to clean up big time on squeeze pages, sales pages, etc. type sites, especially on the smaller guys, but even outside of that, I've seen non-squeeze page and non-sales page sites get taken down for unknown reasons.

There's still money in Adwords, but you have to be a bit more careful and not take it for granted these days.

Brian

They have gotten too big. I posted this on another thread, but applies here I think. We are watching Googles demise, with front row seats. The testing bears me out:

Notice the results Google has returned lately? Sites gaming the system are on top. Sites I am looking for and have any readable content seem to always be on page 5,6 or 7.

Lately I just skip right to page 5 if I am using Google. Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile and every other SE seems to produce quality content results 1st. Google claims content is what will get you ranked, but why then do I see 4-5 sites that violate several of Google's webmaster no-nos on page one of every search? Because they have 10,000 manipulated back-links and 10,000 fake social bookmarks? Many now even have zero readable content (Just crappily spun gibberish)! Must be some secret.

I Give Google a year, two at the most. Between do as I say - not as I do, the worst customer service on the net, obvious incongruities and sidewiki, a whole lot of folk just do not use them anymore for anything. Internet marketers more and more get their traffic from other sources. The most successful marketers I know get less than 10% of their traffic from Google search, AdWords or the Content Network. Writing is on the wall. They had a good run, but a couple years more at best.

Bing is a more targeted consumer group now. In this economy, 55+ yrs old is the greatest group of affluent people that can and will buy. Many of them think AOL or MSN IS the internet! Especially in any niche health related, Bing will convert much higher than will Google. As Google allows more gibberish to game their algorithm, Bing and other SEs will rush to fill the customer service void Google leaves behind. This has happened in business a million times and will happen a million more.

You will notice, even Perry Marshall who made his name on Adwords has almost backed off them completely and his content is more general marketing, more info on other sources like Facebook, and motivational in nature than anything to do with Google. He sees the writing on the wall as well and knows he needs to be more than just the author of 'The Definitive Guide to Adwords.' & 'Adwords for dummies'.

(PS-Perry had a client who spent 16 million a year that Google banned for no reason that either he or the customer could figure out! -other than his CPC was too low?)

Google can do what they want, they are that huge. Will it come back to bite them in the arse? I have no idea, but I think a ton of IMers using Adwords think they are far, far more important than they actually are.

As for banning accounts, I have always wondered, do they ban your Adsense account and then not pay you the money you're due? Do they take your Adwords balance and then not refund you your money?

Not sure if someone pointed it out....but the Soup Nazi is reopening some time this month in NYC. You know it's a bad economy when businesses made famous on a tv show are going under (I'm just saying).

It all comes down to quality. And the fact is, if your sites are so poor quality that you are no longer an asset to AdSense/AdWords then you should probably work on your skills rather than bash Google. Your content has to suck pretty bad to get banned. And this all comes down to the inability of the vast majority to be highly critical of their own work.

As a Newbie who has just got her Final written warning after carefully making my website follow all th rules I thought adwords is a Joke.

How can they expect that newbies to keep up.