I’m frustrated with Google.
Google, I’ve had enough.
I’ve been a customer since the beginning, when you sold search ads on an impression basis. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars with you. Sure, I don’t spend as much as some of the big companies, but you were kind enough to send an electronic picture frame to me last year to thank me for my business.
But I’ve had enough with the “black box†algorithms in your advertising program. Advertising with Google should be transparent, but it’s far from it.
I realize you had to tweak Adwords to prevent people from gaming the system. But how you calculate relevancy and minimum bids is frustrating. Customers don’t like frustration.
You see, my company launched a web community a couple months ago called Virtual Ventures. If you search for Virtual Ventures or even our domain name, virtualventures.com, you don’t see our site on the first page. You see lots of articles about our site, but not our site. That’s OK; I know it takes a few months for you to index new sites.
I’m willing to pay for search ads in the meantime.
So last week I set up an ad campaign to show ads when people search for “Virtual Ventures†and “VirtualVentures.comâ€. The ad asks searchers to visit Virtual Ventures, which they are most certainly interested in doing if they search for one of these phrases. There are no other ads running for these terms, and advertising with you will make our site visible while we wait for you to index it.
After carefully selecting the ad text and keywords, I submitted the campaign.
But I won’t see my ads anytime soon. Apparently your black box thinks that the term VirtualVentures.com isn’t very relevant for advertising the site VirtualVentures.com. Nor is “Virtual Venturesâ€. You’re asking me to bid $5 per click for “VirtualVentures.com”, or asking me to make my ads more relevant. Sorry, not even a Google engineer could pick a more relevant ad for these keywords.
There’s not much I can do. You have a stranglehold on most web traffic, especially the tech-savvy audience I’m trying to attract. But I’m not happy; and that goes for a lot of other customers as well.
Seb says
Google is irritating everyone, making enemies everywhere, even among its faithful partners.
We have a domain name on parking with a parking company using a Google feed.
We have changed the keyword in order to get a better RPM.
This is nothing but usual optimization.
The new keyword highly decreased overall performance so we naturally wanted to step back to previous keyword.
That’s what we did and the domain was suddenly categorized as “Adult” by Google’s Traffic Quality Management, now showing adult ads while the domain is visited by kids !
No way removing these adult ads, the domain is “blocked” and every single keyword submitted now is rejected.
Our account manager at the parking company asked a Google rep for our domain to be re-categorized as non-adult but no one will do anything about it…
The domain performance is divided by 3 and everyone (even Google) is now losing money but they just don’t care.
Someone at Google would just need to check that the domain name was never used as an adult domain name and that we’re just asking to have it showing the SAME EXACT ads as it was displaying before any change was made.
We’re neither asking for something exceptional nor for special priviledge, WE JUST WANT TO STEP BACK.
It’s been 4 years we are Google partners with several hundred domains parked and our reward is that we have to move this domain name to another parking company using a Yahoo feed or adult ads will keep on being displayed to kids !!!
We are fed up feeding Google’s growth and being treated as shit.
Wake-up Google, your partners are tired !!!
You have thousands of employees.
It would just take someone to check and then “push a button”.
You are making enemies within your partners.
At the first given opportunity, we’ll move all our domains and stop feeding you.
We’d all need to do this as you are TOO FAT now and you are no longer listening to anyone.
Guess what : if we develop domains and one of them gets Facebook’s traffic, we already know who we won’t partner with to display ads.
You’d better have your feet back down to earth because one day or another it hurts.
Joe says
Amen Brother–
All of my adverting dollars are going to MSN and Yahoo right now for the same reasons…
Jeff says
It’s just one thing that they’re doing to get their stock price above $700 again…
Steve Baldwin says
Good article that brings it home.
Here’s adding insult to injury – on Google, THIS page is now ranking higher for the keyword “VirtualVentures” than VirtualVentures.com.
Unbelievable…
Steve M. says
Yup; they’re a long, long way from the “Do no evil” days…
Richard Ball says
Pick up the phone and call 1-866-2-Google. A $5 min bid indicates they don’t like your landing page. The AdsBot-Google that checks landing pages as well as the Googlemployees that manually check sometimes make mistakes. I suspect someone didn’t like the look of your site. Call them and explain your situation. Oh, and let me know if they magically get your min bid *below* 5 cents. 😉
HTH
Japh says
Hey, while I can see your frustration and Google certainly are starting to get too big for your boots, I suspect the main reason other pages (including this one) rank higher for the term Virtual Ventures is because those keywords appear here more than on your landing page.
Have you tried doing some SEO there? the term Virtual Ventures, while it is in your domain name, does not appear even once on your virtualventures.com home page… the closest is the word “venture” which appears once, and without the word “virtual” anywhere near it.
Surely this would help Google re-categorise your site as relevant?
As Google say, if you view your site in a text-only browser, such as Lynx, and aren’t seeing your keywords… then GoogleBots can’t categorise you with them.
Make sense?
(Sorry, I’m not trying to tell you how to suck eggs or anything, it just seems like an obvious solution to me…)
Andrew says
Fair point, Japh. We’re working on a new landing page right now.
Google believes the computer is always right. Perhaps they should run 500 or so impressions and see if the ad is getting solid click throughs (and perhaps conversions). What humans do is more important than what the computer thinks.
And I’d think that it should still pick up that the URL is VirtualVentures.com for relevancy 🙂
DomainerPro says
I’m frustrated too, and I’m gradually moving all my ad campaigns to Microsoft Adcenter. I’m taking a hit in the process, but Google Adwords has become so unpredictable, so capricious, and Google customer service so unresponsive, that I have no choice. I’m a small fish, true, with only a $1K a month budget, but that’s $1K that will be going into someone else’s pocket from now on.
Leonard Holmes says
I agree with Richard. Give them a call. You might even reach a human that will help. I had a Google rep call me about a campaign one time and their suggestions were really helpful. They tweaked some of my ads and included elements that are usually against the rules. I guess some of their rules can be broken once someone from Google gets involved.
Martin Edic says
There are a number of misconceptions here. they have a blackbox to improve results for searchers- otherwise the system would be riddled with non-relevant results. Google’s business is built on two concepts: intent and relevance. If they stray from these their search business will suffer and providing great search is how they make money.
Domain parking creates a major quandary for them because parked sites are rarely very relevant- they piss searchers off. Domainers for some reason seem to have a real fear of developing great relevant content on their domains but that day is coming for all of us.
As for MSN search, good luck with that. There’s a really good reason google has 70+% of the market- the others really suck.
Get great content on your sites and these problems disappear.
Guitar Player says
It’s a shame that mistrust of Google seems to be growing… until a few years back they were seen by most as whiter-than-white, but I guess its inevitable that it can’t last forever. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Let’s hope that the powers that G can keep things on the straight and narrow and not turn into another Microsoft.