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.
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?