How Google Banned Me – And The Simple Way to Save Your Ass
I wish someone had told me this two years ago: Google associates your AdWords account to the domains that you advertise. Worse yet, they associate it to the domains and then refuse to break that association. Just to be clear: Its not the domain you have on the display URL or your tracking domain if its in the middle – its the domain -and the page- where the user lands. They keep track of where you are sending the users and the quality of your account becomes forever linked to the quality of experience those pages give the user.
It doesn’t matter if you delete the ads by over-writing them with blanks like I did. It doesn’t matter if you delete the ads, then the ad groups, then the campaigns and all the campaigns in your account and don’t do much of anything for a year. You might as well be advertising child porn to soccer moms during Christmas.
So now you know how to avoid getting banned. Simply put: Never, ever, ever, use AdWords to take users to a page you don’t control. They insinuate they let you get ‘unbanned’ if you correct the pages – which you obviously can’t do if you don’t own them.
Curious to know exactly what happened to my account? Here are the details. If you’re interested in more background, here’s a post with images from the first time they sent me a warning. Note that since about a month before the time of that warning, I haven’t ran a single impression, ad, click, or unpaused any campaigns – all I did was delete my campaigns several months ago and now enter new billing info in the form of a coupon they sent me.
The low-down
I used Google AdWords to advertise fatloss4idiots.com and (another site). Several months after I stopped all my advertising to those sites, on July 8th 2010 I received an e-mail from LPQ-Support@google.com letting me know those two sites violate the landing page guidelines. I had not advertised those sites for several months. They asked me to make changes to the sites. Which I can’t do – fatloss4idiots.com is not my property, so I agree to never advertise them again and delete those campaigns. I have not advertised anything on AdWords since July 2010. All my campaigns have been deleted for several months now. On May 18th I receive an e-mail from Google Adwords (adwords-noreply@google.com) with a $100 coupon, saying “Here’s $100 to come back to AdWords” it seems to be a coupon for people that have not advertised in some time. So I log in to my AdWords account and put the code. The code works fine – $100 is added to my account – and I don’t touch anything else on my account. On June 8th I receive an e-mail that states my AdWords account has been suspended forever. I call their support line and after describing the problem, then I get e-mail saying their decision is final, to not to ask them why or call again. I called them again on Thursday and on Friday I get the same “our decision is final” email with no information or recourse.
Reality check:
To keep the post at the “reality” level, lets keep in mind that all the Google policies and procedures are optional, they can be over-ridden by management, they can be applied selectively, they are defined in one meeting on Monday and changed around on Thursday. Just because someone tells you something is their process, it doesn’t mean it is a law of nature – It means the people you are talking to don’t know or don’t want to help you – it doesn’t mean things can’t be changed. Corollary: Everything changes, its up to you to find out how to make it change the way you want it.
What next?
Not sure. I’m not sure my time or money would be well spent getting this overturned. I haven’t used AdWords for anything for a year now. This is a problem I might have to solve when the need arises. Without an active income stream from them, its hard to justify spending time and resources on this when there are better things to do – I can see it having some strategic value, and it pisses me off ‘to infinity and beyond’ – yet it doesn’t seem to make much business sense to do something with it right now. So… Not sure.
Update 6/15/2011:
After posting on the blog I decided to cut and paste a chunk of this post and send it to Google via the BBB as a complaint. As Mike pointed out, the BBB is useless and powerless. Google had this to say today:
We write in response to {witheld}. We understand that your AdWords account was recently suspended. Paused ads for disabled sites are still subject to review by our team. Please keep in mind that pausing or deleting ads related to the disabled sites will not automatically re-enable the ads nor remove the violation history. Our team has confirmed that this suspension was correct. And the account will remain suspended unless the violating sites are brought into compliance according to our Site and Quality guidelines. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but unfortunately we cannot provide any further assistance in this matter. Google’s primary objective is to provide safe, relevant experiences for our users. The decision to suspend your account was made after careful review of your account and the low quality landing page experiences promoted through your ads. We do apologize that this issue came to our attention shortly after you received a promotional offer. Our Terms and Conditions, to which you agreed to when you signed up for AdWords, state that Google reserves the right to disable any ads when deemed necessary. You can review these Terms and Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
Initial Response Summary
We have reviewed the AdWords account and confirmed that the suspension was correct.
This is a standard mind-fuck response. In case you’re wondering what’s going on here: Its a set-up. They’ve pulled a process out of their ass that makes sure you can’t fix your situation, yet it sounds reasonable and they offer no alternatives. In other words, they do whatever they please – Like that was news.
So I wrote them a little response, really for the principle because I don’t want the BBB to say “Yay! Successfully resolved the case!” when what happened was nothing. My rebuttal:
The explanation about the internal processes of Google does not satisfactorily resolve the material facts: Google has taken permanent and continued action starting June 2011, based on events that took place at least a year ago, which merited a warning in 2010. Google has unilaterally escalated the perceived severity of past actions and provides as a possible way of resolution an avenue which Google fully understand is impossible to execute. While Google’s explanation seems rational, and it may fully fit within the processes Google has defined, that doesn’t take away nor satisfactorily explain nor resolve the material facts that Google has permanently suspended this account based solely on activity that took place a year ago.
So, next up should be where Google says “Lalalalalala I’m not listening! You are gone!” and case closed. Stay tuned.
NegBox, 
joseph are discussing. 
Earl Grey 9:54 pm on June 13, 2011 Permalink |
Unsuprisingly with my background and complete lack of interest in following any rule i lose tons of Adwords accounts.
No real cossitency of reason and i can lose one account and do exactly the same in another account but keep it.
Seems sometimes there is a crazy jobsworth just comes and denys or bans.
NegBox 3:29 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
@Earl grey – Then there’s that black hat route you bring up. Sorta “If you brand me an outlaw, I’ll get off the nice mouse wheel and truly become your nightmare” approach – which I have to agree is as valid as any approach. Everything flows thru the path of least resistance. If it’s significantly easier for me to bypass the rules than play by the rules and the payoff is comparable, you can fully expect me to go dark. By eliminating the payoff for good behavior, and a mechanism of redemption, Google creates a nightmare scenario around this service – pretty short-sighted. A sign of a B-player somewhere in leadership there. You gotta give the little people things to play with that you can see and are relatively harmless… It’s like a religion here: If you couldn’t ask for forgiveness and salvation by doing something, you’d have no disincentive to try to wreck the machine.
Mike Chiasson 10:55 pm on June 13, 2011 Permalink |
When you get adwords banned do they ban your analytics/gmail accounts as well?
I had some other questions but forgot by the time I scrolled by the ladies.
NegBox 2:21 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
It just shows a message as a regular alert inside the AdWords interface. You can still browse around. Other stuff like analytics, etc, remains unaffected as far as I can tell.
Earl Grey 2:22 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
No its just adwords.
Dont ever just download an upload your campaigns to unbanned accounts.
they have some kind of hashing and can tell.
Start new campaigns based on what you have learned.
Some accounts can give me a $5 return for every $1 spent and then when i put it in a new account i can get $8 for $1.
Country you set your account up in makes a dramatic difference.
UK starts slow and gets better.
Switzerland starts well and declines.
I have no reasonable explanation to explain any of this.
NegBox 3:31 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
@earl grey: Good tip, man. Looks like I’ll have to read your blog some more and add you to the blogroll.
Dan p 11:14 pm on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
Earl – How about US?
Do you usually create accounts with UK?
Ryan Eagle 9:13 am on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
Yea i’ve heard and experienced a lot of sketchy stuff with Google Adwords.
greg 6:34 pm on June 14, 2011 Permalink |
Hi NegBox,
I received the same mail on 9th July 2011. Permanently banned from AdWords for advertising fatloss4idiots.com – AND NOW LISTEN: 4 YEARS AGO. Yes, that’s right right: I ran a a month long campaign in June 2007 and the paused it. I haven’t even used my AdWords account in the last 2 years.
And by the way: Google hasn’t ever sent me any final warning.
Can you believe this? They banned me for advertising something 4 years ago WITHOUT ANY – NOT EVEN FINAL – WARNING!!
Google is evil.
Greg
NegBox 2:54 pm on June 21, 2011 Permalink |
@Greg Sorry your comment got flagged as spam, just fished it out. I thought scanning “paused” campaigns for compliance was unreasonable, yet I chalked it up to “whatever”. Now taking into account deleted stuff and even going back years, pretending like the time dimension doesn’t exist, or expecting people to ignore it when attributing consequences to events is not just ridiculous – it won’t hold up to scrutiny. You brain’s evolution connects events that take place close in time according to your short human time scale. If you call your girlfriend “bitch” and she stabs you with a fork, it’s ‘a domestic dispute’. If you call your girlfriend “bitch” and she tracks you down five years later and stabs you with a fork, its ‘attempted homicide’. Unfortunately for Google, time matters for humans.
Patrick 5:31 am on June 15, 2011 Permalink |
Yep, nearly exact thing happened to me. They banned me for an old deleted campaign that I hadn’t run in 3 years, domains were all parked when they banned me:
http://www.pjkdirect.com/2011/03/adwords-account-banned-clear-mistake
It is worth the fight to get back in. There is still a gold mine their if you know how to use it…
NegBox 3:11 pm on June 15, 2011 Permalink |
Well.. Honestly now, it isn’t worth my time or the frustration to play the support-phone-tag anymore. The worst possible scenario is one where they reinstate my account, I go on the have a good income stream from them, and then they decide to cancel it again for what happened five years ago, and I have no clue how to work around them. That scenario will not play out. When the time comes, I’ll either find (aka: Social engineer) a contact high enough in Google to straighten it out for good, or (perhaps in parallel) just open an account as an advertiser from one of the countries I do business in and either outsource it or use my VPN and VMs to access that account and segregate billing and domains.
me me me 2:59 pm on June 16, 2011 Permalink |
Segregate billing? How is it possible to have multiple adwords accounts when I need adwords invoice to deduct expenses for tax reasons? Are adwords aware of the credit card or paypal account, or whatever, the name the money is coming from? Perhaps slightly mispelt names? You say you get past this because you’ve set up LLCs in various countries, I’d appreciate something lighter since doing so usually means tax ambiguity, you can be charged taxes both in that country and your home country…
Patrick 5:35 am on June 15, 2011 Permalink |
Additionally, the whole “set your own landing page” doesn’t always work. They will ban you for bridge pages in a second, or anything close. Direct linking can still work great on the content network. It is a sacrifice for sure. Bridge pages will get you killed in a day though…
didi 6:38 am on June 16, 2011 Permalink |
NegBox, was the ban because you ran ads on the search network?
@Patrick Direct linking is allowed on Google content network??? This is the 1st I’ve heard of that, which verticals or offers work on content network? I have a feeling if I try an email submit on the content network the banhammer will come.
NegBox 3:59 pm on June 16, 2011 Permalink |
@didi: This is a case of Customer Relationship Management left to engineers. Many businesses have customers that cause the business a loss, once the segments are identified, you try to get rid of them. Everyone does this, from ATT to Best Buy to your local Zoo — You calculate things like the Lifetime Value of each particular customer and provide them service and offers to match. You use price points, service hours, service levels, you send offers to only certain customers, you do or do not offer the customer a bonus for not defecting to a competitor, you ignore or include them on your market research, etc, etc. That’s how you get rid of the bad customers. You CANNOT however stop them at the door of the Best Buy and tell them they are barred forever from Best Buy because your predictive engine tells you they are just going to buy the loss leader and there is a 50% chance they will return it, causing a loss instead of a profit – and to not think of wearing a mask because your super-duper technology will recognize them and boot them. See the problem? In some ways this reminds me of that movie “Minority Report”.
@didi: The ban is completely unrelated to where I ran ads.
@me me me: Too many questions man. I don’t have all your answers.
me me me 11:43 pm on June 17, 2011 Permalink |
well then u can lick me scottish balls laddy
NegBox 5:45 am on June 18, 2011 Permalink |
Scottish salty balls!
fm1234 12:31 pm on June 21, 2011 Permalink |
That may be the greatest picture ever posted on the Internet. No, not the tits; they’re nice and all, but I’m referring to the demotivator. Is that a cap from ‘Brazil?’ I’ve never before thought about it, but associating Google’s support with the universe in which that movie takes place actually makes Google support seem a lot more sensible.
Frank
NegBox 2:37 pm on June 21, 2011 Permalink |
@frank Ha! You nailed it. It is indeed is a scene from ‘Brazil’. “Central Services” is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of their AdWords support policies. I had two runner-ups for the “Demotivator”: http://negbox.com/wp-content/uploads/google-01.jpg and my close second favorite: http://negbox.com/wp-content/uploads/google-03.jpg
fm1234 6:38 am on June 22, 2011 Permalink |
I’d also nominate a pic of the interrogation chair; captioned “Advertiser Review: Confess quickly, or you’ll ruin your credit.”
kt 11:56 am on August 11, 2011 Permalink |
Their rules can be very stupid the way they apply it to all cases as a blanket. For example their bridge page rule can be a good thing or completely idiotic. Here is my response to them for being accused of a bridge page but of course they are not going to budge from their dumb position so I will just have to find alternative advertisers:
—————————————-
Wow, your requirements are pretty strict. So in essence you don’t allow resellers of any kind even though some offer great services such as in my case having the same low price for registration of domains and renewal. Just for your information here are a few sites that google adwords are running on and have been running for a while that are exactly the same:
*****Here I included 4 pages that were doing exact same thing as my ad from the first two pages of adwords listings of a keyword search*****
And this was just a quick search. I have seen many more!
BTW, I believe it should also be noted that I am not simply sending visitors to somebody else’s page. That particular page is my reseller page with my
own custom settings and prices. That is why you see the huge title “DomainOfferer.com”. So it is not exactly the same as me redirecting people
to a completely separate site. It is basically my site that is hosted on another domain. I certainly pay for it so it should be mine.
Regards,
—————————————————-
Google is a good company but many that work for it have a special arrogance that deserve to be slapped around a bit.
Dean 5:45 am on October 29, 2011 Permalink |
Ok bro,when I got suspended I was shocked and all fucked up, thinking I did something really bad… well I found the phone number to call them directly and the arrogant prick actually laughed as he pulled up the offer that caused the suspension that I really had no clue as to what the fuck. It was an email submit from peerfly, free ipod scam bullshit that I had already deleted before I was suspended so I was like ” well fuck dude I deleted it and I know it was bullshit”
anyway.. I called peerfly and he told me to abandon that account and start a new one in another sir name.. using my first name and not my middle as I did.. and a different address and a new email.. and that worked. Now I know better than to promote lead gens direct links. You must only promote from your own site,so like Negbox says, so you can control the shit google doesn’t like.. They are such bullies.