It all started about 2 months ago. I was running my Adsense account as I had been for the past 5-6 years. I’d cut down my Adsense display over the past few years because other revenue sources pay better. AdSense was only running on a couple of smaller blogs and forums I have. Certainly, I wasn’t breaking any records in terms of revenue but I was making enough to get a payment once or twice a year.
In February, a client of mine came to me and explained that he got his AdSense account banned for buying traffic and AdSense was an important revenue stream for him. If he stopped buying traffic could he use my account in exchange for 10% of the money. I said, “I’m not greedy so long as you’re still throwing me work we’ll make it 5% and deduct the other 5% off your monthly invoice.” That was settled. I went in, created ad zones, and replaced the code on his site with my code.
All in all, we were running Adsense on about 20 sites and I watched as the revenue climbed to $60, then $70, finally it topped off at about $110 per day and fluctuated from there. I was pretty pumped.
All was good as far as I knew. Within 6 weeks the balance was up to $2,700. Until in mid-March I got an account disabled noticed. Naturally, I went the appeal route and within 4 hours I got another email back saying my account had be reviewed and was still found to out of complaince, and that they could not reinstate my account, blah, blah, blah.
I have no reason to doubt my client. We’ve worked together quite a while and he’s never been dishonest with me. If he says he wasn’t doing anything shady then he wasn’t. What irks me is Google is so damn convoluted in their explanation, in fact there was no explanation other than ‘invalid click activity’. No expounding, nothing, citing “protecting their AdWords clients”.
What irks me even more so is that the appeal process is closed off. You get one form to fill out, submit, and then you get a message that someone will get back to you. 4 hours later, appeal denied. Google, do you expect me to believe, even for a second, that at the scale you do business, a human being went over my appeal in 4 hours?
The real kick in the teeth is the fact that I’ve been a loyal publisher for 5-6 years. All that out the window. No, “Hey you screwed up but promise not to get it again and we’ll reinstate your account” Nothing, just a “We think tou’re a cheat so fuck you that money is gone” we’re supposedly returning it to our AdWord’s clients.
You see Google, I’m not missing that couple hundred a year it’s the principal of just throwing a long standing relationship out the window with no human contact or explanation. So, here’s a fuck you back. You will never get a dime of money, I will no longer run AdWords campaigns for myself or clients. I will never buy an MP3 or Android app from your store nor will I ever click on an AdSense ad again. You can suck the big one as far as I’m concerned.
The timing on this post is poignant after yesterday stumbling across some posts where some users had their GMail accounts frozen, which caught my attention. I think Dev’s have also had similar complaints about apps they had got onto the Android Market haven’t they? I have used the Adwords campaigns that they give you for a free $100.00 startup trial by using a different email to sign up for each one after initially paying for one years ago. We have a seasonal product (a non deet spray) that mainly sells in stores but does a consistent plodding pace of website orders during the season for the past 10 years or so. I have aimed all those campaigns at that product as you’d think they would help, and the results have shown the effects of the campaigns to be insignificant no matter how we tailor it. Recently I decided to get busy and found a Google Chrome extension called ‘Minimalist for Everything’ that allows me to get rid of all the Adwords and clutter in Google pages ( I also installed the Webmail Adblocker extension at the same time.) so I no longer see any Ads in Gmail now anyway. Minimalist is still in Beta but shows great promise not only as a way to clean up your cluttered Google interface, but promoting it (and Adblocker) may offer a small amount of recompense in terms of ‘payback’ for the way you were treated, which sounds outrageous but not surprising.
I’ve heard lots of cases like this. We have disabled your account and returned the funds to the advertisers.
I have NEVER heard of a single advertiser say they had money returned to them.
It’s called a SCAM.