Who Got Slapped This Morning?

[goddfadda]

What reasons are they giving for these slaps? The "improve your landing page relevancy" bs? Because the problem could just as well be what you're promoting (the offer), not how you're doing it. Their reasons are often too vague. Talk to some of their chat representatives and make them tell you the real reason you were slapped.

I have experienced first hand and heard from both other affiliates and AMs that Google really doesn't like CPA "free trial" type offers these days. (The ones that require the user to pay s&h).

I can say from experience they don't like (certain) zip submits. I had one pulling $1500 / day with about a $650 daily spend and google pulled the rug right out from under me. Took weeks to get it to that earning/traffic/cpc level.

So I set up a new domain. Bam up and running again but no where near the volume. Right as I was approaching $1500 again, bam slapped again.

Kept repeating the domain swap and it was working, but now they're slapping so fast (1 week) the profit just isn't there.

I chatted with an online rep and she was clueless, never gave me a good answer. Said she'd get back to me. Also emaild them, and the email was completely ignored! I'm afraid to call based on what they'll do to my account.

Only thing I can assume is they don't like my offer. What kills me is I see a few dozen other people running it, but I guess they're doing the same domain swap that I am. Only one competitor has held through w/o ever changing the domain. No idea how he is doing this.

I was using a 'thin' landing page, but the site it was on had lots of other (bullshit) related content that I wrote myself. The landing page did link to the other content. Didn't seem to make a difference. My competitor that survived has ZERO content.

 

[ImagesAndWords]

You need lots of patience to deal with those clowns manning the customer chat. They're almost always clueless drones who are just tought to copy and paste canned responses. I've learned from this and usually just end the chat if it's clear that the person doesn't know what he/she is talking about. Move on to the next in line.

Once in a while though, you get someone really helpful who will go into detail for you. I actually had one rep this morning admit that Google had mistakenly disapproved 5 ads in one of my adgroups, and it was fixed shortly after. Pwned. This was just because I nagged on the right person and clearly proved my case. Had I given up after the first person I talked to, they would have stayed disapproved.

As far as offers frowned upon, I had an issue back in february that I wrote about here in great detail. Long story short; I was told that the offer I was linking to from my legit and otherwise great-QS landing pages was the problem.

This because they considered that offer a "Data collection" website. It didn't matter that my landing page collected NO data. It was the offer's landing page that did. And this was an offer just like countless others out there. Your standard $20-$30 payout "free trial" CPA offer with a $4.95 s&h, where the advertiser "collects" name, address, email, etc. to ship out a product.

 

[prince]

My competitor that survived has ZERO content.

Maybe they are showing a different page to Google?

One of my friends had a similar experience like yours, he was running crazy volume of zip submits on content network, he told me swapping domains don't really work anymore, you gotta delete the campaign and start all over and need to change the ads and content a little bit.

 

[coglethorpe]

There's got to be a reason for the slaps.

If Google would come out with a well-documented and consistently enforced policy on the matter, we wouldn't have all these problems. They use vague terms like "quality score" and "adding value" to inconsistently slap people. If they would just tell people WTF the rules were, then people could follow them. Sure marketers might get pissed about where the line was drawn, but at least they'd know where the line is.