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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money. It's common knowledge that they can close your advertiser's profile, lock the money and you won't be able to reach them about it. But at the same time, nobody is making a lot of noise about it, although it is a multi-billion dollar company and it is the product that they make most of their money from. Most of B2B start ups that wind up in "Show HN" have better support than Google!

But no one is doing anything, because what can you do — switch another context ad system designed for another search engine? Yeah, right. This is the classical monopoly example, that no one does anything about.

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>It really bothers me, how bad the Google's support is, especially for the products that make them money

In what way was the support inadequate with regards to this article? It seems to me Google responded pretty quickly and resolved this persons issue.

I guess "resolved" is in the eye of the beholder, considering Google's mistake still cost them thousands of dollars that as yet remains unrefunded.

Of course, Google should refund the money. But the support team didn't cause the mistake. My comment was to understand why the poster felt the support was inadequate.

Agreed. Also, explicitly asking for a refund might yield some results in this regard.

Google fucked up, and it took them days to resolve the issue. Decent customer service would offer a refund and possibly even a credit on top of that (without asking).

In my experience, Google support tends to have "the customer is always wrong" mindset.

It probably depends on how much money you're spending whether you'll get a dedicated rep who can initiate refunds without you explicitly hunting them down. $300/day is not even a spec of dust floating in a drop in the bucket to them.

A couple years ago when I was working for an advertising company that was spending several tens of thousands of dollars per day, we were offered large (hundreds of thousands of dollars) refunds on several occasions, including some where the screw-up was our own fault.

Google support is terrible, but they get away with it because they are a near monopoly in on online advertising.

What blows my mind is people that know how bad Google support can be, and they still build their business around Google services (Google Apps for Business, Cloud Computing, Google Wallet, etc). Amazon, Rackspace and many others aren't much more expensive and you get world-class customer service.

I guess they don't want to open the floodgates to all the support queries they would get. But it is most frustrating as if one is dealing with the "computer says no" travel agent from Little Britain.

This has always bothered me. People always say that Twitter and Google can't offer real support because they would be able to handle the number of incoming requests.

But that's exactly what companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart do every day. For crying out loud, even Comcast (COMCAST!) has better support than Google or Twitter for their paid products.

Amazon is pretty top tier. Just being able to email jeff@amazon.com about an issue is huge (and I've seen people recount what happens when they get the forwarded "?" email).

Also they will correct any mix up almost immediately and will almost always credit you when you ask (or at least throw in another free month of prime).

I disagree.

try being a seller on amazon. Customers scam you all the time and you just have to take it. If you decide to fight it, your sales stats go down and an automated bot will ban your account.

when you appeal, there is nobody that will help you. The only support is email, which is a series of automated responses. Nothing more.

and emailing jeff@amazon.com? That hasn't worked in many years.

sellers make amazon a large percentage of their profits, yet they can't even given them any real support. If you look in the main seller forums, there are countless stories of people with long-term businesses getting banned for reasons like this with absolutely no recourse. They are abusing the monopoly they have on the online marketplace.

on top of all of this, amazon gets to keep your customers. They aren't really yours anyway, since you can't send them any company contact info or collect an email address.

They will also only admit this when it can. Ensued to their advantage. If a seller sends you a wrong or broken item, you will have to pay for return shipping. I asked amazon reps about this and they say because i am a customer of a 3rd party selling on amazon, they won't reimburse me.

It's funny how that works......

Exactly, but the thing is, Amazon looks like they went in completely ready to compete with the big boys like Wal-Mart on this level. All of the major retailers have call centers and phone numbers posted in their stores for people to call in. Major manufactures like John Deere and Ball and even Phillip Morris have consumer call staff.

When Google and Twitter say they can't handle incoming calls or respond with anything other than automated email, what they are really saying is 'fuck you, we have no competition'...which works great until there is competition.

Google adwords is not for small advertisers. Period. It may work fine if you spend millions of dollars or if you have so much time and experience in your hands that losing money is not a problem, but it doesn't work for the general population.

We find Google adwords an invaluable way of backing up our TV ad campaigns and we are a fairly small start up. I've spoken to a number of Google reps and they were all really bothered about making sure that as a small business we were able to get up and running quickly because they "know we don't have a big ad department" - so from my experience, Google absolutely wants small businesses using them.

Thinking about it, with Google's push to make you add your business location to maps etc they are really starting to compete with the Yellow Pages which was/is basically 100% small to medium businesses - I guess it's a market where the combined long tail is much bigger than the big players.

We find Google adwords an invaluable way of backing up our TV ad campaigns and we are a fairly small start up.

I think if you're running TV ads, it's a given that you aren't a small advertiser in the sense that 'coliveira probably meant.

Size of business really isn't important, life time value of a customer is really the primary metric when evaluating whether or not a paid channel will work for your business.

If you can convert a lead profitably then it makes sense to advertise in that channel.

If you spend $400 per lead and you convert 1 out of every 10 leads to a paying customer, then it costs you $4,000 to acquire that customer. If the life time value of the customer is $10,000 with a 50% profit margin ($5,000), then you just profited $1K!

PPC is really a game of arbitrage. Where it gets hazy is calculating correct LTV (considering customer turnover, referrals, etc.) and properly tracking conversions. It's not an exact science but good advertisers can get accurate enough.

The key difference for small businesses is that the fixed costs of learning and managing the system can skew these numbers.

For bigger advertisers these costs are insignificant in comparison to the media bill

I'd count us as a relatively small advertiser, but it works perfectly well for us. Since I've taken over our accounts, I've made quite an impact in terms of traffic and conversions, and we don't spend that much compared to big brands.

That, and I've gotten them on the phone for support a few times already, answering random questions I have, pretty satisfactory.

This is absolutely not true.

My experience is very much the opposite. Large companies tend to overspend on adwords due to agency interference, ignorance, apathy, and organizational dysfunction.

Small businesses, like doctors, for example, can make a mint with AdWords. If you sell the right kind of product, it works exceedingly well even at tiny scales.

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