Impending Slap... more AdWords oddities

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Spendlessly

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May 31, 2007
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I have a campaign that has successfully been getting impressions on both the search and content network for a couple weeks.

It's a full fledged site that contains a single review style page that I drive most of the traffic to. Everything was 9/10 or 10/10 as pertains to Quality Score until today... some very strange shit started happening. I've been slapped in the past, but this is unique - and quite frankly, I don't want to call AdWords as it has never once helped my situation.

I should add that this review page sells rebill products (not acai)

So today, ONE keyword, out of hundreds, which was exact phrase matched - got disabled, eg 1/10 qs. Here is the description it gives me under the quality score tab:

Make your landing page useful, honest, and easy to navigate. Strive to create a happy and meaningful user experience. Learn more

OR
Choose a more relevant landing page for your ad. Learn how
Click to expand...

In addition, my content network impressions have stopped completely. All other Search network keywords are unchanged... still 9/10 & 10/10 QS.

Here is where it gets odd for me. If I try to add ANY new keyword in this campaign, it immediately goes to 1/10. As said before, none of the other keywords were impacted - ONE keyword, which happens to be the name of the product that is the "highest reviewed" on my LP.

I'm willing to bet that the rest of the campaign will be slapped very soon... but I have never seen it done in this way. Any insight anyone?
 


Spendlessly said:
I have a campaign that has successfully been getting impressions on both the search and content network for a couple weeks.

It's a full fledged site that contains a single review style page that I drive most of the traffic to. Everything was 9/10 or 10/10 as pertains to Quality Score until today... some very strange shit started happening. I've been slapped in the past, but this is unique - and quite frankly, I don't want to call AdWords as it has never once helped my situation.

I should add that this review page sells rebill products (not acai)

So today, ONE keyword, out of hundreds, which was exact phrase matched - got disabled, eg 1/10 qs. Here is the description it gives me under the quality score tab:



In addition, my content network impressions have stopped completely. All other Search network keywords are unchanged... still 9/10 & 10/10 QS.

Here is where it gets odd for me. If I try to add ANY new keyword in this campaign, it immediately goes to 1/10. As said before, none of the other keywords were impacted - ONE keyword, which happens to be the name of the product that is the "highest reviewed" on my LP.

I'm willing to bet that the rest of the campaign will be slapped very soon... but I have never seen it done in this way. Any insight anyone?
Click to expand...

Brandon actually posted the same exact occurrence in another thread. Like I said there, the issue is with the landing page. Luckily, Adword was kind enough to actually tell you the problem, unlike other cases.

Basically, your only option is to amend your landing page. I had this happen to me several times before, and after speaking with my adword rep, he basically said I need a new landing page if I want to run that specific keyword. Some keywords Google is really iffy with and has a very selective taste to what can be advertised to it. Same thing as trying to advertise a porn site but targeting keywords such as; girls, beach, party. Google will "slap" those keywords from your list. Since they have selective rules on advertising on such keywords or such landing pages.

Same thing applies that keyword you have.
 
We are not trying to run on unrealted keywords. I am sending the users who are searching for [insert product name] to a landing page that reviews [insert product name] as the #1 product among it's competitors.

This would also not explain why I cannot add ANY new keywords to this campaign, regardless of what they are... I add them and qs is immediately 1/10 but any keywords that are already in the campaign are still running flawlessly.

They are either calling me out on a bogus review, or there is something else going on. But I still do not understand why everything else is still running. Did they make it so that I can't expand on it until a human can review it... perhaps this 1 keyword was the red flag trigger...
 
Just to clarify - it's no longer an impending slap... the whole campaign is starting to go to 1/10, one group at a time. This makes it a normal slap. Nothing to see here. Unless you get off on seeing a relatively clean advertiser turn very, very dark.
 
Spendlessly said:
Just to clarify - it's no longer an impending slap... the whole campaign is starting to go to 1/10, one group at a time. This makes it a normal slap. Nothing to see here. Unless you get off on seeing a relatively clean advertiser turn very, very dark.
Click to expand...
This is exactly what happened to my acai campaign. First one adgroup got slapped and then a day later whole campaign got slapped.
 
Google was on crack today.

I had content campaigns that I paused and it didnt matter. I couldn't stop traffic. I have campaigns to run at certain times of the day, that didn't matter.

I have a colon cleanse campaign that's sitting around for days gettting no impressions (not slapped, just not allowed to run) then BOOM, I wake up and its over my spend limit and traffic is coming like crazy.

Then I have all my ads on rotate, and what does Google do. Takes my lowest converting ads and runs them 75% of the time. I mean, WTF?!?

I love the traffic, but I like to monitor it to. Its like Google content is possessed and has taken over all my campaigns and all I can do is sit back a watch.
 
Yeah... had a gigantic chat session w/ an adwords rep while shit was falling apart. She reassured me that this would only impact my content network shit... blah blah blah... every keyword in the campaign is now 1/10. She tried to pin it on relevance which is complete BS. The site is of better quality than 90% of the sites using their service.

It's like I told the Google rep... I'm not going anywhere, my family relies on my advertising to get by - It's best we work together.

If they want to force me into underhanded tactics, so be it. I was trying to be as legit as possible. Now I'm going to make 10 new sites a day and serve them all up at the same time. What do I have to lose... it's not like they are going to slap my "good" campaigns - they already have.

Fuck google adwords. They should not be taking on the task of policing the internet... and at least if they were going to take a crack at it - they should police it with consistency. Now shittier sites than mine have all moved up a position, and a direct linker using the "url trick" now has the top spot. Hows that for quality.

Google should take notes from the war on drugs. When you ban something entirely and don't work with people - you drive it underground, where it becomes a 100x larger problem.

Why is a nutriceutical product rebill not allowed, but a credit report rebill is. It is completely non-sensical. - oh and when asked why some sites are allowed to advertise on AdWords while I am not - the rep asked me to please send screenshots and URLs so they can be sent for manual review. Rigggghhhht. What a fucking joke.

I'll celebrate every day that their crummy stock slides down the fucking tubes, and when the plex burns to the fucking ground - I'll fly out just to do a tapdance on the smoldering ashes.
 
I have the exact same sentiments towards Google as you do, but it seems now they're slapping accounts as well (or at least putting those that violate their new "rules" under strict watch). I can't even use my main account anymore to run anything, even my quality sites are fucked with them.
 
Yeah... and they seem to treat new accounts under the same MCC with similar scrutiny. I'm going to run all of my ligitimate stuff in Yahoo and MSN, and use Google to lie cheat and steal. I'm done playing by inconsistently enforced rules. I've tried to bend to their arbitrary rules, but my efforts have been completely wasted... yet my sites continue to run flawlessly in every other advertising platform under the sun. I'm sure their shareholders will understand when the snowball starts rolling.

First their advertisers will start giving up... bringing down the amount google can charge for a click. Then google will not be able to pay their adsense publishers what they deserve, and they will flock to the next best thing. This will drive up competition in more transparent systems... it could seriously snowball and leave google standing there like WTF. I understand that they are trying to keep their ads from being seen as "scam ads" - but lets fucking face it... when 90% of the offers being promoted on your advertising network are scams, and your company is not viable without said scams - you might as well stop kidding yourself.
 
Spendlessly said:
Yeah... and they seem to treat new accounts under the same MCC with similar scrutiny. I'm going to run all of my ligitimate stuff in Yahoo and MSN, and use Google to lie cheat and steal. I'm done playing by inconsistently enforced rules. I've tried to bend to their arbitrary rules, but my efforts have been completely wasted... yet my sites continue to run flawlessly in every other advertising platform under the sun. I'm sure their shareholders will understand when the snowball starts rolling.
Click to expand...

Glad you brought that up. I was going to ask how this is impacting other accounts inside MCC. Say for example I had affiliate accounts and client accounts (paid search mgmt) under the same My Account Center...could the client sites get screwed?
 
I need to vent a little too..

@Spendlessly; Dude.. I totally relate to what you wrote. I'm getting more and more sick of Google for every new campaign I try to launch or maintain running these days.

A few years back it used to be a breeze. It is so true that these days they are not consistent or predictable at all anymore. Approval and disapprovals are becoming awkwardly more arbitrary. Way more. This with the exception of their large raids on things like Acai / diet rebilling and blog style sites lately.

It's as if they once in a while catch wind of that a niche is getting too many complaints, and they crack down on it hard across the board. And as a result, they also crack down on semi-related (or even unrelated!) sites they shouldn't be messing with.

Spendlessly said:
oh and when asked why some sites are allowed to advertise on AdWords while I am not - the rep asked me to please send screenshots and URLs so they can be sent for manual review. Rigggghhhht. What a fucking joke.
Click to expand...

And yes - I have been through this same thing with them! I have kept an eye on competing sites that were basically running the same style LP, same style ads, etc. on the same keywords. Yet - my LPs got slapped to hell (after initially having had good QS), while the competition is left running month after month to this day. Those same sites were blatantly breaking Adwords' TOS, yet they're allowed to run. A spit in the face for all the hard work you put into building up a solid and legit campaign.

When I have brought this to their attention, their response was "those sites are in compliance with our guidelines and hence get a good QS". O'Rly? Eat my ass and balls...
 
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