Operating in googles ecosystem is a very scary business model. One day you're making money, the next you are begging for scraps. It's like the farmers of old that had to deal with the weather without forecasts or even a basic understanding of the driving mechanisms.
If your business depends on ONE source of income only, and that source of income goes down the drain you are toast. If you currently have a good income stream from a single source then use all the spare time you've got to build a second one, sooner or later you will need it.
And yes, google support sucks. I've yet to get a real and to the point answer to any questions I've ever sent them. Customer service is definitely not their strong suit.
I am "the guy". I have a Yahoo account (currently inactive) and an MSN account.
The biggest issue I have with the two "competitors" to Google, and I use that term loosely, is that they don't have nearly enough inventory to sell me to make it worth my time. Example: I have bought approximately 65,000 clicks in from Google in this calendar year. Over the same period, Microsoft (which plain lacks a display network, where I get most of my clicks) has managed to find less than 1,000.
Yahoo was similarly terrible back when I used them, and in addition to charging me too much for not enough, they routinely borked their conversion counting, causing me to believe my spending on them was profitable when it was, in fact, not. After I audited their numbers and discovered their lack of facility with math, I stopped advertising with them.
I had similar experiences. Also when I last used Yahoo they had a "minimum spend" restriction, which meant that if they were unable to find you enough traffic, they'd charge you any way!!?! I closed my account after a couple of months of them charging me because they couldn't deliver enough traffic.
You should definitely always contact google by phone though. Email never works well.
It depends on the market he's working, Yahoo does not have the same volume that google has and chances are that he does not get the same returns on his time there because of that. Niches are tough. Once you have one it is a little cash cow but if anything bad happens then you find out fast that a niche is fragile. A single competitor that works a bit harder than you, a drop in your traffic... Chances are that somebody is simply outbidding him.
He's spent 12K on ads to date according to the piece, that means that he's had to sell at least 400 licenses to break even.
Apparently his market is to sell $30 software to create bingo cards, hardly a mainstream market.
If you look at Google Trends, "bingo" is searched for more in Sweden than in the USA. Perhaps localizing to Swedish or some other locales would make sense, since there is probably less adwords competition? Change the strings in the software, get a clued translator (often I see utterly terrible "translations" of foreign landing pages) to also do the landing page and ads.
Considering all the error's I am getting on the page, I hope he isn't paying for adwords traffic.
Couldn't write to: /var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-content/cache/wp-cache-c35bfed8135767fe63f5725b08629444.html
Warning: fopen(/var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-content/cache/wp-cache-c35bfed8135767fe63f5725b08629444.meta) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/kalzumeus.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 240
I keep the blog off the business server precisely to avoid the business croaking when I make a poorly thought-out chmod decision at 2:30 in the morning when troubleshooting traffic issues.
(They want me to make my whole wp-content directory writable? Really?)
The article was nice and informative but I immediately stopped reading when I encountered this statement: "You weren’t even worth enough of our time to have one of our $6 an hour Indian callcenter employees sign her name to this."
I think this generalization was unneccessary and was actually insulting. As an Indian myself, I feel bad for this widespread attitude.
There was a bug in the Rails code he wrote, so he berates Google until the last couple of paragraphs when he explains it was his fault (he thinks?) Did I overlook something in the article?
I think that's exactly why Google sends out form letters as their first wave of defense.
Well, it could have been the bug in my Rails code. I find that unlikely, because the numerical impact would not push this campaign out of its historical norms. It could have been a bug in Google's code (like their automated diagnostic reporting "Your account has no credit card associated with it", which is contrary to the truth and scares me because if the right hand of their system is as borked as the left hand then that very well could be my problem). It could have been a concerted effort by a group of bored Dutch housewives to simultaneously monopolize 99.999% of the entire advertising inventory on teaching bingo sites.
If Google were interested in talking to me, there would be a little less wild speculation above. Heck, "I checked your account. Everything is fine on our end. Best of luck to you." would be an improvement on the answer I got.
I can understand your frustration, but this is how it works almost anywhere. Like if someone joins an IRC channel about a programming language and says something like "I'm getting build error X when including library Y" people will just say "working fine here" or "did you check the wiki?" or something like that. Someone will have to surrender time to help you and you'll have to give more information and run through options with them.
I mean, it could be a lot of different things causing it.
The bogus error is bad, though. Also, as a paying customer, you would think they would have a better response. Damn :[
Maybe someone ran some numbers and found out it was a better idea to just hit everyone with form letters first, to dissuade the people who will never get adwords working anyway.
True enough. He has a point though: customer support does not scale. On a relationship that has spent $12K in advertising you could easily afford the little bit of work to work with this customer and get his problem sorted out. The fact that google sends out just a form letter does not help their image, and in the long term may be bad for their business. Personally I don't even try to get a reasonable answer out of google if there are issues (and yes, there have been issues in the past, most notably in the click fraud domain).
He didn't say his account was suspended, right? It's just that he screwed up how the conversions work and therefore google stopped showing ads because they weren't converting. Sounds like adwords is working perfectly.
Am I the only who checks my adwords account almost daily when I have a campaign running? A month seems like a long time to wait, plus you'd expect to see regular charges in your bank/credit account.
If your business depends on ONE source of income only, and that source of income goes down the drain you are toast. If you currently have a good income stream from a single source then use all the spare time you've got to build a second one, sooner or later you will need it.
And yes, google support sucks. I've yet to get a real and to the point answer to any questions I've ever sent them. Customer service is definitely not their strong suit.