The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway.
Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance.
We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded. In the end our client fired us and they went back to their old agency.
Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.
Of course, we could never speak to a human being at Google and explain this. One day, the truth about Google Ads (and Facebook) will come out, which is that it is all 85% fraud anyway. Save your money.
Today, we no longer do business with Google Ads or Facebook. Given these companies make up 95% of digital ad spending, it’s fair to say we are no longer a digital ad agency. We’ve adapted to market around big tech, whether they like it or not.
With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?
Sorry, are you saying that it is common for people to bribe insiders to bypass policy and hurt their competitors? This is the first time I've heard a story like this.
Thats apart of the world behind the world. What people say and what people do are entirely different things. Do you know the kind of things Google execs had to do to get into the china market? It sure wasn't all in good fun. Business by human nature operates by drama, lies, deceit, and leverage.
The lies and dishonesty come from the highest authority in Google. The only real solution is to force the dissolution of big tech and create competition once again. The only thing that can change business behavior is effects to profit.
To the persons voting my comment into the dirt, I was being sincere.
If you really have never heard of this type of thing occurring, then you are either willfully ignorant, or completely separated from the reality of how business is conducted with Google. I don't say this with malice, but with plain honesty. This is a fundamental part of how the interaction with Google works. To deny this so plainly can only make any sort of sense through sarcasm.
> This is a fundamental part of how the interaction with Google works
Working in Ads at Google, this isn't something I've ever seen. If you're able to share details of cases where bribing insiders has happened (either here or to my email) I can look into them?
This hardly seems like a productive sentiment. A system is only as corrupt as the people in it, and this person is openly trying to address a specific problem the best way they know how. Why would you try to dissuade them? I don't understand what your end game is except to make Google more corrupt.
Paying off an insider to get something done that actually needed to be done seems a hell of a lot less problematic than capriciously destroying someones livelihood with no justification at all as the parent indicates that Google did to them.
There's nothing wrong with taking gobs of money to work at a huge corporation but at least be honest that they are terrible.
"Just get you issue to the front page of hacker news, if you can't make it fuck off" is not a valid support strategy for one of the biggest corporations in the worls
Would you prefer nothing to happen? In the real world, we have two bad choices: either google ignores it completely, which I’m certainly not defending, or some of its employees try to make good. Why punish people for doing the right thing?
Of course I think their support is generally reprehensible. But we don’t have a third choice right now, so these employees taking initiative seems like a win.
Or maybe it's part of their strategy? Remember, Google is an advertising agency.
They are sending a message out that their support is maybe not 100% adequate, but if you do have an issue, just raise your voice on social media and it will be fixed. In the end everything will turn out allright, not?
The message they are sending out is downright misleading. Maybe we should even say no to that.
It would be better if that googler or google itself recognized that having lots of automatic switches that destroy businesses, or people's email access or other things with no recourse is unacceptable and worked on that. Google should have an ombudsman or office that deals with these issues. I'm sure there would be lots of fraudulent claims. But there would be lots that were not. Please google let people pay to speak to a human for help when there is a problem.
That would be even better. Google search email and docs are almost public utilities at this point. But at least, we need to regulate on Google shuts down accounts, because it can really screw people's lives and companies. That reminds me I need to copy everything out of my own Gmail and docs again Just in case Google one day says I'm a persona non grata.
This would fall under anti-corruption laws, it's a legal matter and Google is obligated to show due diligence in investigating any disclosures, in any form they may appear.
Until there's a legally mandated dispute process that requires disclosure as to why an individual/org is blocked and whom or what system ordered it, and how to challenge it; your individual efforts will fall on deaf ears. Hell, until there's accountability, you might as well join in on the racket and take payola for hellbanning.
Most systems these days are automated blackboxes of hellbanning, whether you pay or not. It is the 1950's parodies of the USSR "You know what you did, and we cant tell you what you did because you already know". And here it is. Google is only one such.
I sincerely appreciate the offer. This problem is too “cold” to resurrect today, and far too late for our business. I would be glad to know that Google is taking steps to ensure this cannot happen in the future.
Specifically:
* When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.
* The vast majority of businesses and agencies simply want to follow Google policies to the letter. Unfortunately the letter of policy is often ambiguous or unclear. When a policy violation is alleged, particularly against long standing and high dollar Ads accounts, there should be a presumption of innocence. Google should explain clearly and directly what is needed to remedy policy violations instead of playing security through obscurity and “guess what I want” games.
* At the end of our time as a Google partner, the automation had become unbearable. We spent 90% of our time resubmitting Ads and campaigns that were suspended or halted for no apparent or clear reason, analogous to advertisement “whack a mole”. Imagine literally any other outlet treating advertisers this way. For example, imagine Viacom suspending a nationwide ad campaign without a word of explanation. Imagine The New York Times pulling an ad without so much as a call or email. It’s patently absurd.
> * When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.
Let's start with this! I too had a Google Ads randomly get nuked and had no way to talk to any customer service agent, after thousands of $ of spending a month.
You seem to be the closest person on this thread who can answer questions about Google. Can you please tell us why Google summarily suspends accounts? Why is there absolutely no way to talk to a human being?
I can't speak for Google, and I don't work in that part of ads, but my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is. If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.
>If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught.
I don't really buy this.
The most effective adversaries already have a deep understanding of detection mechanisms and are typically just tweaking parameters to find thresholds of detection. Other companies mitigate this by delaying bans and doing "ban waves", or even randomizing the thresholds (I have done both for certain types of automated bans for attacks on my systems).
More to the point, adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference. False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.
Full disclosure: I have been the victim of a false positive flag in that my app with over 50M downloads on google play was removed and then reinstated when my reddit complaint post got human attention (thank g̶o̶d Google).
> adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference
I'm not sure that's true. Adversaries know they are intentionally trying to game Google's system, but that is not the same as knowing all of the internal parameters of Google's system. Telling them what they did wrong in specific cases might well give them useful additional information about those internal parameters that Google does not want to give them.
> False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.
While this is true, it is also not actionable, since the whole point is that Google does not know which positives are false positives and has no cost-effective way of finding out (since finding out would require actual humans and the scale of its ad business is too large to make the number of humans that would be required affordable).
Not the number of humans it would take to replace their automated fraud detection algorithms to dramatically reduce false positives at scale, no. The whole point of their business model is that all of those processes have to be automated, otherwise they aren't profitable.
Thank you for the response. Please read this comment.
This does make sense, but why the atrocious support? I mean at least reply to emails even if we have to wait for a month to get a response, just give us something real not the canned, automated email.
I've never ever clicked on any of my own ads EVER and I got suspended for "click fraud" and I'm sure there are many people like me... Why do I have to be terminated without any recourse? This feels, for the lack of a better word, pure evil and cruel. This makes people deeply hurt and hate the brand.
I'm a developer and a business owner and because of my experience with Adsense and Adwords there is NO WAY I'll ever use Google Cloud, no matter how much discount Google is willing to give me and I'm definitely not alone in this. This behaviour is going to destroy Google in the long term. Right now you guys make money on advertising, but as soon as you need to sell something, I'm not sure people who have been hurt are willing to pay for it.
Agreed, I have been burned in the past (2015) by a ban on google play store and adsense on one of my business. It was impossible to talk to a human or get any details and this killed the company.
I'm now a Google hater, I'll never do any business with them like EVER even if they pay me to use their products.
Also I'm the opposite of an ambassador for Google brand. I managed to turn several huge customers in EU and US to AWS or Azure solutions instead of Google cloud... Several times and I'll continue to recommend companies to not do anything with Google.
Yes in the long run their attitude and people's like me will continue to destroy their brand.
I work with a lot of fraud teams at a FinTech company, and we have the same exact problem. If you give out too much information around what caused the enforcement action, people are able to figure out the exact formula used to trigger a risk check, and will float right under it.
> I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.
Google does not know how to fix this because they don't think outside of the tech box. This is very much an issue with their way of doing things.
You build relations with advertisers. If someone is spending 20k per day on your system (for months or even years), you better have someone to talk to and actually look at the issues they have.
In case you work in the relevant part of ads, could you say why advertisers are allowed to buy their competitors' literal trademarked business names on Adwords? This seems like a protection racket: "nice business you got here; it'd be a shame if that knockoff down the street paid me enough to bury it..."
Absolutely agree. The company I worked from had a persistent problem with someone stealing customer details by buying AdWords targeting our brandname with a fake phishing site. We would report it, 2-3 days later Google would take it down. Then the next day, they'd be back with a different phishing site. At what point is Google just complicit?
I saw it when a business for which I did some work would have customers calling from their competitor's lobby saying, "This stupid receptionist doesn't know about my appointment, what do you mean I'm in the wrong place, I put your name in the phone google?! Screw you I'm going to just get the work done here!" Google/Maps/Android had customers driving past the business for which they had searched by literal business name to some other business that was spending more on Adwords for that literal business name.
By the complete lack of response from the Google representative above, one may infer that he works in exactly this relevant part of ads, and has nothing to say in his defense.
> my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is.
Let me rephrase this to make it clearer what the actual issue is: it's primarily because the cost to Google of false negatives on fraud detection (failing to detect actual frauds) is much higher than the cost to Google of false positives on fraud detection (flagging users as fraudulent that actually aren't). So Google is willing to accept a large number of false positives in order to avoid false negatives.
Or, to put it more simply: the incentive structure of what Google has chosen as its core business model means it is in Google's interest to randomly penalize a large number of bona fide users simply because a much smaller number of users are fraudulent.
In other words, this is basically unfixable unless Google changes its core business model.
I actually wish some Congress critter would propose a law that would require companies to "give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know" and require a registered human agent for communications in these situations.
So the policy can't be found in the TOS and the reason is really a lie? Obfuscation is complicity--part of the problem. Get it all out in the open and the problem will resolve itself. The bedrock of our most hallowed institutions, and principles of democracy and free markets, supposedly refute your reasoning...if you believe in any of that. Listen to yourself as you apologize for the master scammers.
Wait what? I can bribe a human at google to flip a switch and there are no checks and balances in place to discover a change made to a 20K a day account?
How many google insiders can take bribes like this? Have they gotten rich from it?
What’s the minimum spend to get official help then?
Considering there are over 150,000 people working at Google, I would assume the odds one of them would take a bribe to be pretty good. That said, it certainly doesn't prove this has ever happened.
There are 150,000 people at Google. But how many people can, on their own and without being noticed, flip that switch. And how much are they getting paid that they are willing to risk their job/career/a lawsuit to flip that switch? I assume their compensation from Google at that level is already pretty healthy, so it's not like they'd need that money for a necessity.
It sounds unreasonable. But then again look at how many people complain about being banned by Google or Facebook for no reason and without recourse.
Maybe all it takes is to know a guy who can complain about the account in the right way that it automatically gets suspended and waiting for a human to take a look takes however many weeks.
Maybe 20k a day is still small fry according to Google. That’s only 7million a year. Apparently Coke has a total marketing budget of 4 billion a year. Couple of the big guys on board and 20k a day is just a rounding error.
There is a reasonably well documented underground economy of bribing Instagram employees to verify accounts (blue checkboxes) [0] and steal sought after usernames.[1]
Amazon employees have been convicted of bribery for taking $ to "leak information about the company’s search and ranking algorithms, as well as share confidential data on third-party sellers they competed with on the marketplace".[2]
If this happens at Facebook and Amazon, I can imagine it happening at Google.
[1] I did not find any citable evidence on the first page of Google, but it's something I've heard from friends that are into influencer stuff. Supported by a quote from [1]
"he decided to message someone with an interesting handle (a.k.a. username). That someone said they were able to take over that account because he worked at Instagram."
A single user, let alone a single employee, can certainly flag a variety of things. A user flag by itself seems unlikely to permaban a not-tiny customer, and maybe a single employee flag seems the same. However, employees are better positioned than the general public to understand the combination of small actions that will yield a big result when cranked through the mysterious nonlinear algorithm. The employee wouldn't have to understand the algorithm, because theoretically no one does. (Hello alibi!) She would just have to observe its judgments as part of her normal employment duties.
Yeah those are all sales reps that just want to get you to waste your money on junk. When you actually have a problem and you need real customer support you get routed to India so you can listen to a low wage employee ignore the substance of your problem.
The entire advertisement ~~industry~~ racket is a case of an emperor with no clothes, a problem looking for a problem.
Products should not be forced upon people at random times.
All advertising should be replaced by opt-in directories with better indexing and filtering systems that let people search for what they want, when they want.
“I want to see games like Dark Souls but in 2D with pixel art and a soundtrack like Blade Runner”
Instead of mass-raping everyone’s privacy just to guess what people want, let people tell companies what they want.
Instead of manipulating people with false impressions, products should stand out on their merits not on their marketing budgets.
Honestly just banning all advertisement outright would snuff so many ills of society: coerced consumption, waste of resources, waste of time, uglification of public spaces, invasion of privacy, jobs whose sole purpose is to deceive, and other bullshit.
What system do you envision for bringing awareness of your product to new customers? Or do you just mean traditional advertisement and not marketing in general (ex: paid or incentivized product reviews).
From the advertiser's perspective, if I can spend $x to acquire a user with an LTV (lifetime value) of $y, and $x < $y, why would I not? How would you prevent it?
I like to think that I'm immune to advertising, and I suspect a lot of people here think that way too, but the bottom line is that it does work well enough on enough people to yield a positive ROI in many, many situations.
Why do you think your new product deserves customer awareness? Why is it so important to impose yourself upon the awareness of others? How is doing that with a goal of acquiring money even slightly morally acceptable?
If I figured out how to do something for $1 and it provides $3 worth of utility, how is it immoral to pay some money to inform people so they can get that $2 of extra utility in their lives by making that trade? As far as I’m concerned, stopping me from running that ad is morally equivalent to destroying the mail sorting machines at USPS.
You don't need advertising if you have a useful product. You only need discoverability.
Advertising is an industry of mental pollution. It exists explicitly to convincing people they need to buy a product. If they don't know they need to buy it without being convinced, they don't actually need to buy it.
It is literally not worth $2 to me to have your junk injected into my brain. This isn't personal of course. I don't even know how useless your junk is. But the fact is, if you're selling a thing, I don't need it. I have more things than I need. I need less. I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things. And that's not even getting into the real issues with advertising.
Advertising is a lot more than your argument claims. It isn't just notification of a product's existence. Advertising is specifically convincing people to buy your thing. Maybe informing people of your product's existence will get some sales. But you'll get a lot more sales if you convince people they want your product. And you'll succeed at that a lot more easily if you attack statistical psychological weaknesses than if you just list product features. This isn't an accident, and it isn't going off the rails. It's what advertising will always become, because it's effective.
Your argument is along the lines of "well I won't abuse it." That's completely irrelevant, unless you're the only person allowed to advertise in the whole world. It really doesn't matter what your goals are. It matters what the effect of the policies you recommend are, and advertising has well-documented negative societal impact. As long as you don't engage with the actual problems with advertising in your arguments, your arguments aren't addressing my point.
If you actually want to address my point, tell me how you can fix the negative societal impact while still allowing advertising.
It might be worth defining your point in more detail. Here's the spectrum as I see it with examples, from most invasive to least. I'm curious where you (and others) draw the line.
- TV / streaming ads that fully disrupt your content.
- Interstitial / popup ads that let you close them after some amount of time.
- Interstitial / popup ads that let you close them immediately.
- Banner ads that try to emulate your content. Ex: Sponsored search results that are specified as ads. Product placements in movies.
- Banner ads that clutter and introduce noise to your content but don't disrupt it directly. Ex: web banners, sports stadium billboards, highway billboards, store front signs, guidance signs ("yard sale down the block"), brand logos on products (esp. on athletes), "temporary" sale notifications.
- Subversive ads masquerading as content: UNDISCLOSED sponsored product reviews
- Ads masquerading as content: DISCLOSED sponsored product reviews
- Unintentional ads: genuine, un-incentivized product reviews. Answering your friend's question "what IDE do you use for X?".
- Indifferent and unconscious ads: your choice to use a product in public and not try to conceal that use.
Almost no one is going to argue against the first few being a net negative, and almost no one is going to argue that the last one is even worth thinking about. So where do you draw the line?
> I'd pay $2 to not own your thing specifically because I don't want more things.
You can do exactly that in many cases. Youtube Premium. Hulu tiers. I'm curious how many people nod at that quoted statement but don't actually do it. It's an easy choice for me to do it because I want to support content creators and the opportunity cost of my time is way higher than what these features cost.
Full Disclosure: My F2P multiplayer games get 75-90% of their revenue from advertisements, and most of that is interstitials. Whenever possible, I configure and experiment with close timers to find the right balance of UX and revenue. If I didn't have ads in my games, they would not feasibly exist. Unlike your home internet, most hosting providers charge per byte of data transfer.
That said, I also offer an ad removal in app purchase at a net loss to me. It's a net loss because what typically happens is players who spend the most time in the game are the ones that are significantly more likely to buy it. But the players who spend the most time in the game are also the ones who would be seeing the most ads if they didn't buy it. They are also producing the most data transfer (ie cost to me).
> What system do you envision for bringing awareness of your product to new customers?
Directories, with extensive search and filtering and opt-in recommendation systems. Powered by ML or what have you.
Personally, as a consumer who is always looking for new shit to spend my money on, I have yet to see any ad that showed me something I actually liked or purchased.
Some of the best things I have discovered have been through word-of-mouth, manual searching or sheer luck. For example the GamingSuggestions sub on Reddit. (Please don’t ruin it with subversive marketing if any of you adholes are thinking of that)
Sadly almost every major market platform actively hinders and cripples their search and filter features, except maybe Steam. I don’t know why. Maybe they are afraid of competitors combing through their data?
I search for X and I get almost completely unrelated results, often paid ads hijacking the search terms.
Why is it so hard to search for, for example, an iPhone 12 Mini Red with 64 GB, and not see results for any other models, Samsung, or cases and other accessories and shit?
Worse, as-based systems vary by region. So even if I’m often searching for anime and manga, Google can’t seem to infer that I would like to see such results near the top when searching for related things, unless my IP is from Japan.
Just. Stop. Guessing.
I literally told you what I am looking for to spend money on, so only show me that, until I specifically request other similar products.
Anybody can ignore letters from attorneys without consequence. (It might be prudent to seek legal advice, but your attorney might even tell you not to respond.)
It's only if attorneys file lawsuits that you have to respond via filing court or arbitration documents.
If your business relies heavily on Google to get customers (Adwords) or for generating revenue (Adsense, youtube, extensions, search, …) You are doomed. Google will/has terminated accounts on a whim with no recourse: one day you wake up and your business is destroyed, all you have is a vague, automated email and no way to contact a human being.
"Oh you spent 4 years working on this extension and have thousands of paying customers? We removed it because, well… we can't tell you! And, no we won't bring it back."
"Oh sorry we have to suspend your Adsense account AND keep all the money because… well, we can't tell you!"
"Oh you composed an original song for your youtube video? we're going to suspend your channel with 3 million subscribers because our system wrongly flagged your song as copyright infringement. And, no, we won't bring your channel back! ever!"
"Oh you use our PAID email service for your company paying us thousands every month? Oops, you're locked out because we falsely flagged you. We might give you access again in 2 months, we'll see… In the meantime use pigeons to send messages"
To Google you are just a number, a statistic. They absolutely don't care about you or your business because they have market power.
This company is the worst partner you can ask for, a true monopoly abusing customers and users alike.
You are correct but staying away from Alphabet is a lot easier said then done. They are still the best way for a small to medium business to reach customers. Ever since the iOS changes that crushed Facebook's targeting capability Google has only become more dominant in the advertising space.
To me it seems like avoiding Alphabet basically means avoiding advertising and it is really hard to grow a business without it.
I’m kind of surprised we haven’t read about this kind of thing happen to something like a public school or hospital (surely they exist?) relying on Google services.
Yeah, but it won't take the algorithm long to figure out who you are and terminate/ban your new account. And, because you tried to circumvent controls, any personal accounts you have are also now banned forever. TBF I read about this on HN, not my personal experience.
I have a suspended Google Merchant Center account for an ecommerce site. That's Google's service to list products for their "shopping" search tab, which you also need to run shopping ads. I sell some home decor items I hand make in my home workshop with a laser cutter and paint. Nothing weird, just like "welcome to our home" type signs. It's a standard Shopify-hosted store with flat rate shipping, a posted shipping policy, return policy, privacy policy, and contact page with a contact form, my address and my phone number on it. That should check off all of Google's requirements for a merchant center account. But, it was immediately suspended and multiple requests to reconsider the suspension just get me a form letter back saying my site violates their policies. No human at Google will ever give me any specific reason why.
Every month or so, one of my Google Ads for another site gets suspended for violating the policy "Certificate required: free desktop software". This policy is about ads that link to downloadable .exe/.zip desktop software. My ads, which have been largely running without change for 9-10 years, are for a SaaS analytics service for marketers. There is no desktop software or downloadable files on the website. Just your typical pricing/signup/login pages like any web app. There is no rhyme or reason as to what ad in my account they will suspend each month. I can create the same ad again and it'll be approved since there is no actual policy violation.
Like OP, I can easily reach a human to sell me more ads. No matter how many times I click the unsubscribe links in their emails or ask to opt out, they actually hound me, at every email of mine they can find, and all my personal and business phone numbers, to take "account review" calls where they can try to talk me into spending more on Google Ads. But when it comes to getting support for policy issues, nobody will talk to you.
Your account may be hacked, or your website may be hacked. Fraudulent Google ads that link to downloadable malware is a huge problem that Google has not been able to solve. (It's truly a problem on a very, very large scale, in my experience having Google Ads on our websites for revenue.)
Good luck getting a straight, specific answer from anyone at Google regarding supposed problems that violate one of their vaguely worded policies. Some of the stuff flagged by their automated systems are laughable - one that comes to mind is an ad promoting genealogy research that was blocked for promoting birth control.
Not that the other platforms are much better. A nonfiction book publisher once told me her Amazon detail page on a book about surviving breast cancer was rejected for promoting sexual content. Besides the description containing the word "breast", the word "therapist" in the description was interpreted by Amazon's "AI" as being about rape.
I can't let this pass without commenting on it. When did promoting birth control become a problem ? Is Google run by some religious cabal who believe that we shouldn't contradict God's will ? I assume the intention is to keep various groups in the USA happy ? Would be interested to know if you can "promote birth control" outside of the USA.
> Google doesn't allow ads related to birth control or fertility products in the following countries: Bahrain, China, Djibouti, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Yemen
Hmm. If I understand correctly, the website is a play to get money from Wolt by getting other people to sign up via OPs referral code. Seems kind of arbitragey - OP is not actually selling something, and Google would probably rather get the advertising $ from Wolt directly. So I see where Google's coming from, and think it can reasonably be classified as "Engaging in practices that circumvent or interfere with Google's advertising systems and processes, or attempts to do so" - the examples given are non-exhaustive. Why OPs and not other promo / coupon sites? Who knows - maybe the others add some more value, or maybe G will come for them eventually. (Edit - corrected assumption of OPs gender)
I think the main problem here is that Google don't let you know what went wrong or let you have any actual human you can talk to. This is what makes their decisions seems arbitrary is you have to guess at best why this happened.
Our company Adwords got banned a year ago, hours after our creatives got approved. The reason was our site was "phishing" and trying to steal people's data.
After appealing the ban multiple times with no luck, we weren't getting anywhere. I talked to a couple of people I know who work at Google (one works in Adwords) and basically said there's nothing you can do.
What we did find out is that the ban was completely automatic, and the most likely reason was that it couldn't render the content on the Angular (wonder what company created that) site we were pushing the ads to.
Since we have all our emails on GSuite, we've tried getting a few different people in the office to signup, and they get instantly banned after they signup.
We try every few months to appeal but get the same old "policy violation".
Looking on the bright side, I now don't get random calls from angry people in India demanding I need to "optimise" my ad campaigns.
Welcome to the world of blackhat SEO. If someone starts driving up the price of ads for a targeted keyword, you generate a massive amount of abuse and pay people to write complaints to Google.
From Google's perspective, they look at your account and see activity that indicates you are doing terrible things.
Coupons are an extremely competitive and hostile market to be in. Not saying what happened to OP is fair or acceptable, but things aren't always as obvious looking at them from the other side.
The obvious thing to me is that a bigger part of the problem is how much effort and time it takes to get a human with authority to change the decision to look at it in many cases. If it’s even possible at all.
If one could phone an agent as easy as one could phone a sales rep, the problem would be way smaller.
If each service/account termination was signed off by a human with the authority to cancel that decision, things could improve a lot. If they’re concerned about DDoS, they could optionally require the same human involvement for account opening.
Exactly, competitors may well be the source of your problems. It's cheaper (and safer) to trash your competitors than raising your own rankings (with SEO).
When I ran a torrent tracker for TV shows I was pushing $1m+ a year through PayPal. I had my own personal account rep, etc. They didn't give a fuck about the pirated material.
My competitor though, they would email PayPal every week telling them we were selling child porn. It would take PayPal no time to lock our account while they logged into the tracker and looked around to check it was still only TV shows. We'd be out of revenue for a few days each time.
That trick is absolutely the quickest way to destroy any online business.
When I was in e-commerce, I was told a story that implied that one merchant in a niche market paid a botnet to DDoS his competitors in the tiny niche during the Christmas rush.
I have no first hand knowledge if it is true, or who the merchant was, or the botnet, it's all hearsay and rumor ... but it's the sort of rumor you have no trouble believing after working in e-commerce for a few years.
With something like coupons where you are making affiliate revenue, advertisers have it pretty well dialed in how much they can bid and still make a profit. Since they aren't selling a product directly, there is zero advantage to continue bidding if the price goes up. They are left with two options: find a new market, or push out bidders to low the competitiveness of the market.
As someone who manages both SEO and PPC campaigns I don’t think that’s true. SEO is a subset of SEM and the “blackhat tactics” that SEO’s can use against competition are dramatically different than those used in the PPC world.
I'm in the cannabis space; but don't touch green-product. Google doesn't like cannabis business. Some of my competitors (somehow) are able to advertise on the Google platform. And I almost got my whole company kicked out of our Google eco-system (Workplace, Cloud) for even trying to put an ad for our business in there.
But we have a contact there, cause we're paying clients on Workspace (Email, Drive, etc). So, didn't get kicked off hooray -- but then asked about how/why can others advertise their cannabis-related businesses but we cannot. "We'll get back to you..."
And I know, from at least one competitor (cause we're friendly, small industry), their ad-spend was not very much (ie: USD $2500/mo). Another friendly competior got their account banned (but it was a throw-away gmail account).
It's frustrating when the algo picks/chooses winners/losers and it still seems pretty ad-hoc/random. What permits one cannabis-related business but blocks another? Shouldn't an algo be consistent?
Was just pondering if you could unionize (in a very loose way).
Come up with your own set of rules that come within google's, peer review each other to ensure that you meet your own rules - then if google pulls one of you, the rest of you walk.
Don't have to shift how google works, just present to google as a large enough mass of money that you get promoted to a service rep, rather than templated rules and emails.
There's also a benefit on the google side - that if you're a self-moderating group, what gets escalated to them is likely to be a valid issue.
I think this is a great idea. The only way to deal with power is to amass sufficient counter power of your own that ignoring you becomes more costly than dialogue.
Stories like this seem to pop up semi-frequently on HN.
So I'm wondering -- has anyone tried to sue Google, perhaps in small claims court (for U.S. residents)? Surely that would at least compel an actual human to address the account closure, ban, etc. I am assuming there are legal or financial reasons this approach is unwise?
Perhaps, but in a normal business partnernship, you have contracts that spell out the terms and means of recourse. With Google ad services, you have vague ToS spelled out by one party and no real recourse.
Maybe but having no mechanism for recourse is pretty unusual. Even Heath insurance companies, which are one step above bloodsucking parasites, have phone support that can actually do stuff.
Health insurance companies are subject to tons of regulations per the Affordable Care Act. One which does not allow them to refuse customers and another which gives customers the right to appeal to a third party.
> > Google is not your friend and must be treated as an adversary.
> This applies to literally any public corporation.
I can clearly see the "not your friend" part.
Are all public corporations the adversaries of citizens though? I'm not sure.
I'm not asking for edge cases: companies tend to be friends and not adversaries for their CEOs, for example, and I can imagine that Red Hat (when independent) was not any individual's adversary).
But it a good heuristic that any given public company will be your adversary? Certainly none really care about you.
>Are all public corporations the adversaries of citizens though?
In a way, yes. Public corporations generally seek profit maximization. Rational consumers seek value maximization. More profit for seller = less value for consumer. Less profit for seller = more value for consumer. This is an adversarial situation by definition.
I don't think every corp really warrants this kind of response. Google has a monopoly, and does an exceptionally poor job of assisting their customers. It is not the norm.
Come on, in this case it’s pretty obvious, your website was not doing anything of value. Just a random middle man expecting to be paid for existing. Put your promo code on your website fine, but then wanting to advertise on it? That just seems like a dodgy thing to do.
I think some people downvoted this question of mine, so I’ll try to clarify my thinking.
Google is paid by advertisers to refer people to their content.
I was paid Wolt credits by Wolt to refer people to their service.
It seems to me that providing people with a promo code that they find valuable, and that Wolt finds valuable is providing a similar kind of value as Google’s own advertisements, even if mine is minuscule, and even if I use Google to advertise it.
I think you are violated Google's Circumventing systems rule. I noticed your affiliate site is using woltcode.de as domain name but "wolt" is maybe registered trademark of wolt.com. Google cannot allow this kind of similar domain name in generall.
There are only a handful of companies that have crossed the $1 Trillion USD market cap threshold.
Tgese are some of the richest entities in all of human history and their direct customers cannot even get a reply to an inquiry that has destroyed their livelihood - and there is no law or regulatory body that requires them to.
This is embarrassing as an American citizen but moreover as a human in our current society - what exactly do we value/reward that this gets barely any attention?
You are not allowed to promote websites with someone else's brand name. The site you were promoting was a trademark violation and Google Ads took it down correctly. The trigger may also be the food delivery company complaining legally about your ads to Google.
Create your own site eg my-free-food-coupons.de and then run the ads.
That makes sense. I’ll try moving the site to a different domain and submitting my seventh appeal.
If this is indeed the problem, it’s hard to understand why their support agents couldn’t have divulged this information in one of my six previous appeals.
Good to know they haven't changed a bit since I was banned, 17 years ago.
This seems to be the norm with many american tech companies. They abruptly cast you out with a vaguely worded template explanation, no one will talk to you or explain to you what happened. Appeals are rejected.
I have a blog where I post about my android app development. My apps have a link to a page in that blog explaining some details of the app. A few months after creating it the "show ads" button was enabled and available to be pressed (and even encouraged you to do it). I pressed it to see if it was worth it, a few days later the account was suspended.
As usual, I never got any confirmation about the reason, but years later I think the issue is that one of my apps is very popular (1M users) and basically the 99% of the blog visits are from that app, directly to the app page. I suspect some visits are from bots too, so the most probable cause is that the traffic was flagged as invalid.
I experienced the same outcome due to an outsourced foreigner being unable to access my U.S.-only website. So Google's 150,000 foreigners are in charge of determining everyone's website visibility.
Usually I mute TV commercials, but one time I had them on and I found out from a commercial that Nightmares on Wax was coming to my town soon.
I had no idea, I don't follow music news. But I bought tickets immediately. I love them and I'd never seen them live before.
It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to. And I'd have missed it without advertising.
This is an outlier experience, but it shows that advertising can be a positive when it's not perverted by all of the things that currently make it terrible.
Sometimes there's a gap in our knowledge of what products, services, events are available. I can remain skeptical of the specific claims made in ads while benefitting from finding out, oh, there's a new pizza place near me, I should try it.
Ads are more annoying than useful, and tracking me needs to stop. But as usual, the most extremist view (positive or negative) is not the most useful one.
No, that's just the only anecdote I told. But the experience of going to one great concert makes up for a year's worth of ad impressions that I ignored and did me no material harm.
There needs to be some kind of law that mandates that a company MUST reply to customers and/or users within a given time and offer a proper redress process.
I remember years ago FB would block your site and they would give you NO OPTION to contact them - like AT ALL (they used to hide the support chat button, and I think they still do from some people).
I also knew a company that got its own IG account indefinitely suspended because malicious competitors accused it of cloning their names, even though they were the ones doing that. There are even some articles on Google about being able to pay people to do this for you for like $50.
And they could never get that account back after months of trying to talk to FB about it or send documentation to the recommended appeal links (all apparently useless).
This is unacceptable from any company where you are a customer/user, let alone multi-billion dollar companies that definitely have all the money they need for proper support.
If your support is this poor/non-existent, you shouldn't get to talk about your "record-breaking multi-billion dollar profits" quarter after quarter.
This is something we as a society can decide upon, whether or not these companies like that (of course they wouldn't).
“If your support is this poor/non-existent, you shouldn't get to talk about your "record-breaking multi-billion dollar profits" quarter after quarter.”
I am wondering more and more whether these companies are so profitable because they are more efficient or if a lot of their profits come from cutting customer support most companies used to do.
It is possible no one at Google knows the actual reason behind an ad or site being suspended by Adwords. The programmers might spit out a generic reason while the actual reason is on code line 3,098,089. No one knows and they all hope for the best.
> There needs to be some kind of law that mandates that a company MUST reply to customers and/or users within a given time and offer a proper redress process.
It wouldn't do any good. The legally-mandated reply would just be another auto-generated form letter.
I hear you, but it isn't going to happen. Somebody needs to create a viable competitor to Google. A lot of people have tried, but it is extremely difficult.
Friends who use DuckDuckGo tell me that the quality of their search results has become quite good in the last year. I’m a new user so it’s hard for me to say.
Does it seem like a viable competitor to you?
Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance.
We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded. In the end our client fired us and they went back to their old agency.
Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.
Of course, we could never speak to a human being at Google and explain this. One day, the truth about Google Ads (and Facebook) will come out, which is that it is all 85% fraud anyway. Save your money.
Today, we no longer do business with Google Ads or Facebook. Given these companies make up 95% of digital ad spending, it’s fair to say we are no longer a digital ad agency. We’ve adapted to market around big tech, whether they like it or not.
With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?