My Adwords Are Turned Off
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
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.
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.
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.
You should definitely always contact google by phone though. Email never works well.
Email for this sort of thing simply doesn't work well.
That's exactly the way I feel about Google too. 'Nuff said.
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
(They want me to make my whole wp-content directory writable? Really?)
I think this generalization was unneccessary and was actually insulting. As an Indian myself, I feel bad for this widespread attitude.
I think that's exactly why Google sends out form letters as their first wave of defense.
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.
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 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.