I recently tweeted about this, but as it is such a serious issue, I thought I’d write the full story in a blog post.
As you may know, Google has a service called Adwords, whereby customers can pay them to have ads on publishers websites (where publishers get paid for this through the Adsense program, more on that here). They have a choice of the following:
Prepay - Paying a set amount in advance, and when all of this is used up on ads, they stop showing
Postpay – Set ads up and the balance will build as ads are clicked which is then charged to the advertiser
I set up an Adwords account, and paid for the activation & £10 (£15 total) which was set up right away, but a voucher was sent through to me to an old email address not long before for £75 of free ads which I read shortly after, but it would need to have been used on signup, typical!
So I signed up on my sisters account with the voucher and am now happily running ads on the google network, but no longer have any use for adwords on my own account. All I need to do is cancel it and get a refund, right?
To do it all I needed to do was click the following:
and then type a reason and cancel here:
Oh no, I got the following error!
Refreshing the page, emptying cache, logging out and in, using a different browser & using a different computer didn’t fix the error.
Alright, so I now need to go through help, and their steps shown below what needs to be done :
But wait, I already did that! I really could do with talking to an Adwords Rep right now, who could sort the system out and cancel it for me, but nothing shows about it here? I keep going round in circles to the same place!
Then I discovered the Adwords Support Forum, and boy was I in for a shock. Google ignores its paying customers! The Billing section is littered full of people with complaints that they could not contact anybody regarding their problems, some had been overcharged, some (like myself) could not cancel their account, and some were even still paying for ads even though they had NO CAMPAIGNS in their account!
Heres just some of the things that have been said in the Billing Section:
“The only thing more annoying than the fact that I can’t find a way to cancel my account is that there’s no way to contact customer service! Only a virtual monopoly like Google can treat customers like crap and get a way with it…I’ll be happy to be gone!”
Shown Here (notice the rep sends him through the same loops as me)
“Miss Sarah,
I see a lot of pissed off customers on your forum and I’m one of them. I can tell you where the contact flow is breaking down and you know it too. There is no phone number posted ANYWHERE and the one your customers share on the forum also takes people in circles. WE NEED A PHONE NUMBER THAT’S EASY TO FIND WITH A REAL PERSON ANSERING THE CALL.
It’s NOT HELPFUL AT ALL when the “AdWordsPros” send us to the exact same place we were already running around in circles at. It’s infuriating. What’s up with that? Are we not paying customers?
Come on! Googles knows the problem. I suggest you model MICROSOFT’s customer support. It’s exceptional.
I cancelled my account I’m that mad. Yahoo and Microsoft are much better and less expensive.
Why is that?”
Google is a massive company, and earns an extremely large amount of money, and its both worrying for potential and existing customers that there is no support if there is a problem with an account, especially when large amounts of money are being paid to the service. Its understandable that there would be a large number of issues and complaints, but other large corporations seem to cope, don’t they?
If you are looking to advertise your website, Adwords is a good option for reach, but a very bad option if anything goes wrong while you are with them!
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I think this is also relevant to adsense. I had an account once, which was working fine. Then one day, there were suddenly about 1000 more clicks, so when it came to paying me, I was banned for life due to invalid clicks, yet I didn't cause ANY of these invalid clicks.
I sent in an appeal (quite a few in total) and all I ever got back was a template response saying that my appeal was denied, and apparently they never tell you the reason why they denied it, because according to them it's for 'security purposes'.
As you might well imagine, I wasn't too pleased about this. I found out the Google UK number and called them, but there were no operators online (possibly because it was quite late). So instead, I called the Google US number, and got through to some woman, who told me that there was no telephone support for adsense, and I should check their website or something for help.
I gave up bothering with appeals, and went and found myself some other ad networks, which have served me well ever since. No problems.
Also, just thought i'd let you know in case it's still worth a try. Bearing in mind that it was a couple of years back when I was doing this, but when I phoned the Google UK number, i'm SURE I remember there being an option for Google Adwords, because I remember being annoyed that adwords users got that, but not adsense.
Anyway, Hope that helps
Kind Regards,
Henry Cole (Henco)
Good Post, my English is bad (sorry), but you have reason.
Yes, i`m From Peru. Adwords is bad with customers support. Tahy make much money and dont have a number phone!!! I pay for a service, but the problems is big.
Yeah Microsft and Yahoo is very cheap, and they have best relationship with customers…
Great post.
I too ran into the Google Adwords purgatory. When my specific Campaign with 1 specific Ad Group with 1 specific Ad with maybe 10 specific keywords were all getting 1/10 for relevance, I got pretty confused.
Example Ad:
Raptor Software
Carlson Civil Suite 2010
year-end special only $2250
http://www.raptsoft.com
Example keyword:
[carlson civil suite]
“carlson civil suite”
carlson civil suite
The landing page for the URL was even “http://www.raptsoft.com/carlson_civil_suite.asp” which is all about the product.
We were getting all 1s with our “Quality Score”. We even tried to up the anti and go with up to $10/click because the special was ending at the end of the year.
Needless to say, the circular help files were of no use. Even the “how to contact support” page (http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer...) lists several ways to contact support. You supposedly can email them (but there is never an email address), chat with them (but chat is never available), or call them (but an automated system routes you to the web site and then hangs up on you).
So, we too tried to cancel our account and get back our pre-paid money. We too tried numerous browsers, computers, clearing cache, etc. None work. We get the exact same error message “There was an error with your operation. If you were trying to make a change it may not have saved. Please refresh this page to try again …”
Its unbelievable that this approach is tolerated. Our ads are important to our business and thus we wanted to include Google (still the #1 search provider) in our marketing efforts, but this has been incredibly painful. No amount of modifications seems to provide a solution. Bing and Yahoo are SOOO much better for quality and service.
Google is a massive company, and earns an extremely large amount of money, and its both worrying for potential and existing customers that there is no support if there is a problem with an account, A voucher was sent through to me to an old email address not long before for £75 of free ads which I read shortly after, but it would need to have been used on signup, typical!
Google is not different than the Mob to me. I had adds “running”. However, they were not showing on , no matter how many times I refreshed the page. I contacted google by email, but nobody ever replied. The bill however turned out to be almost $300 in one month, while I swear I paused my campaign. I think what happened was this. After I contacted Google complaining about the add not showing, they unpaused my add. Of course they will never admit this, crooks. Nobody you can contact over there, it's just one big mafia, like so many other huge corporations.