Google Adwords Shuts Down Million Dollar Affiliate Account
November 9, 2009
Stumble it!This is a testimonial from an affiliate marketer getting banned from Google Adwords, even Google employee (With a nickname called Adwords Advisor in Webmaster World forum):
This is how Google is currently treating some Adwords customers, and has destroyed our business (amongst many, many others) and the livelihood of many people:
- 1. Has a long-running policy of causing high click costs when customers promote sites with poor landing page quality – otherwise known as a the Google Slap.
- 2. Adds to this policy by deciding that the promotion of poor landing page quality sites is sufficient to terminate accounts without warning. The landing page quality is determined by “the AdWords system” using secret “specific filtration methods”. No humans required.
- 3. Many accounts are shut down without warning, without any notification anywhere of this new policy. Typically affiliate marketers are those affected.
- 4. Many more accounts received a final warning, and then subsequently were shut down.
The chief complaint I think everyone has is that the process is automated, and there is no way to seek recourse, no matter how large you account is. Almost as bad is that system is unfairly biased towards super affiliates. A raw number of poor quality violations is used, irrespective of the size of an account. AdwordsAdvisor, correct me if I am wrong…
Our experience went like this:
- 1. First we ever knew about the policy was receiving a final warning.
- 2. We promote thousands of merchants – so it took about a week to remove every ad group that even has a remote chance of breaking landing page quidelines.
- 3. We ceased creating new ads or ad groups, so that we could not possibly lose our account.
- 4. One month later, after 12 hours of wondering why none of our ads are showing, we get the automated email saying our account is disabled.
Despite our very best efforts to do everything possible to please Google, it was all in vain. If we have caused bad user experiences in the past, it was minor (relative to thousands of merchants we promote), unintentional, and immediately rectified upon finding out about the new policy.
Our background:
Multiple millions spent on Google Adwords Exclusive deals with many major online merchants We don’t even have landing pages – we direct link to merchants. Please, no replies bashing Google in general. I just wish to discuss this specific policy, and I’m hoping AWA can pass on that the current process is faulty and needs addressing by Google.
Without going to deep into specifics I can agree with what you are saying. As Google has grown they have lost their human side. Automated account closures are in my opinion very wrong. I am sure that Google’s automated processes more often than not catch the bad guys, but there is collateral damage and this has, and is causing businesses to go under. this applies to both sides of the fence Adwords and Adsense.
Automated processes are a good thing, but they should never have the final decision. If anything the automates system should flag accounts and they should be manual reviewed by a member of Google’s staff. If Google where to try and say the scale of their operation is to large for human intervention, then perhaps its time they grew up, show some responsibility and hired the extra staff. They aren’t just canceling accounts they are messing with peoples livelihoods.
My Notes
This user/company/super affiliate is spending million of dollars in adwords earning money from affiliate and the good thing that everyone should focuss is that they revelead their secret they use “Direct Linking” and is working! What that means? With direct linking you still can make money online. Reading more about it even Google Advisor in the forum agree and check what he/she replied:
Already passed along.
I sent your post and a link to this thread to the right folks a short time ago, SuperF.
I know the comments in the previous thread have been taken seriously and that your comments here will be taken seriously as well – and we are exploring what changes can be made to the way this is handled.
AWA
I would like to mention also that´s why when you create a landing page you should create a “Full Website” instead of just a one-page (even 3-5 pages) landing page. I would like to recommend to check my PLR that I am selling to limited users which has 90,000 articles there in different niches.
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November 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
G takes part in plenty of unfair practices, and they’ve made it clear they don’t like affiliates – but what can we do? They are synonymous with SEARCH – meaning that for anyone outside of the IM arena, G is going to be their first choice as a search engine. I think recent figures have them close to 90% of the search market (?).
Anyhow, they basically have a monopoly on search, so they make the rules and change them as they see fit, because there is nothing anyone can do about it. Anyone who is really in IM has been burned at least once if not several times.
But, they are not breaking any laws, just being unfair and talking out of both sides of their mouth, so unless someone wants to give them some competition, we are stuck playing in their minefield.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
“A raw number of poor quality violations is used, irrespective of the size of an account”
And they don’t look at how long you are using Adwords. If you are using Adwords for about 4 or 5 years you they use the same raw number as for someone that is using Adwords two months. They should look somehow at a percentage of warnings relative to amount of campaigns/adgroups and how long the account is running. Using raw nummbers is bad.
Amazing, that is almost exactly the same as how my experience (I also only use direct linking to the vendors website):
1. First I ever knew about this new policy was receiving a final warning.
2. Contacted support and asked how to prevent this in the future. Answer: follow the guidelines.
3. Removed each adgroup that had a remote chance of breaking landing page quidelines.
4. I also stopped creating new ads or adgroups so that I could not lose my account. Also checked on a daily basis all keywords and deleted each keyword with QS lower then 5.
5. One month later (yesterday) I see no activity in my account. Via online chat with support they told me my account was suspended.
And I thought after the e-mail I received and after having contact with support about this issue and after removing the campaigns/adgroups and not adding new ones my account was clean.
When Google sends a final warning they should check the whole account so you can remove all adgroups that Google does not like. Currently you get the first and final warning from Google and the warning does not tell which adgroups are affected (you have to guess). You take action and basicly one week later the algorithm can decide:
“Hey, about the first and final warning last week, great you took action and deleted the adgroups but today we de decided that we don’t like one other adgroup that was sort of aproved last week. So for this we will ban you for the rest of your life. And yeah we know, in the past week you did not make changes to you landing page, keywords or ads. Today it is still the same website as one the one we aproved last week but that is not our problem.”
So yes, there are indeed some problems with this new proces. Perhaps this will be better in the near future. But I think that is to late for people like SuperF and me.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
We had our adwords account terminated today. This after spending neraly £100k in advertising since 2005 and spending the last 4 months trying to work with the adwords team in Ireland.
On the 18/7/09 I contacted google adwords about our account. Our ads had stopped serving due to low landing page quality score. I spoke to one of the representatives at length in an effort to try to understand the policy so that we could overhaul our websites so that they complied with google adwords advertising policies.
On the 20/7/09 our websites were manually reviewed and I received the following communication….
On 17/9/09 our adwords account stopped serving ads again for the same low landing page quality score issue. I contacted google adwords again and spoke to a representative . He again refered it to the specialist team for manual inspection and I received the following response…
On the 25/9 we received an automated email about repeated site quality violations with a threat that our account would be closed down. I again called google adwords and spoke to a representative . He assured me that the email had been sent in error and that as our account had been manually approved there was no chance that it would be closed.
On the 27/9 I received a second automated email about repeated site quality violations. I again contacted google adwords and asked whether this was another system error and whether we needed to take action to revise our websites again. I received the following response…
I was advised to make no further changes to the account. I adhered to this request. Since our account has been manually approved I have made no changes to website content or adwords ads.
As you can see from the threads and our communications with the adwords team we have done everything we could to comply with the regulations. In addition to that we have been assured several times by 3 different adwords representatives that our account is fine as it has been manually reviewed. We have also been told that the warnings we have received have been due to system errors.
We did contact the adwords support team again this morning who confirmed that our account had been terminated for repeated LPQ violations. He said that it would be refered to the policy team but there was nothing else he could do.
When I requested making a formal complaint he said that there was nobody to complain to.
The bottom line is that even if you think the problem is sorted with google adwords it may not be. If adwords support tell you that your account is OK and will not be terminated – dont belive them.
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December 7th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
i have just had my adwords account blocked, i have spent more than 50k on advertising in 12 months. These were all my own sites, and they claimed i had a low page quality compared to the keywords – and they are the ones who suggested the keywords, completely shafted my life, my livelihood and my family, they sent me no warning, just disabled it, i emailed them and they said the team said i had ads disapproved in the past 9 months ago which did no meet their guideleines and due to this past violation my account has been banned permanently. back on the dole then.