February 23, 2010 By

Google AdWords Support Run By Robots

adwords-suckThere is no real human being in the Google AdWords support team. Only robots who are programmed to follow specific commands and send out canned email responses. Sure you may be thinking I’m just saying this after my AdWords account got banned. But do take a look at this ad which I’m sure many of you may have come across if you’re in Malaysia.

If you understand Bahasa Malaysia, you will know that the ad is advertising prostitution, using Google’s content network. Yet the actual site itself is a rather dodgy MLM program, highly likely to be a scam.

How can an ad like this one not violate their terms of service? Don’t they actually have a support staff who understands BM doing quality control?

Perhaps the AdWords robot support team just haven’t been updated with the latest software patch and language module. They are full of so full of shit that they don’t even know they stink.

Filed Under: Google AdWords Tagged With: ,
February 20, 2010 By

My Google AdWords Account Got Banned

I promised to talk about how Google banned my AdWords account and almost forgot about it. Just to get the record straight and remind myself never to depend on Google, I decided to write it finally.

So the word “ban” usually implies that I did something terribly wrong, right? Well actually, I really don’t understand exactly what I did, even till today. Let’s go back to that stupid anonymous email I got from Google AdWords:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality.  As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future.  Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling.  These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

  1. Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
  2. Sites that charge for “free” software
  3. Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
  4. Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
  5. Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account.  In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies.  Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

So that was it. After six bloody years using AdWords and trying to keep up with all their ever changing Terms and Conditions, and never getting ANY campaigned banned or slapped, I was just cut loose.

Banned for life. Email didn’t even contain my name.

The thing is, I wasn’t even promoting any affiliate stuff, just three of my own sites: Death of a Blogger, Host Commando and PLR WP Videos.

The “Death of a Blogger” site was getting a good 28% optin conversion from AdWords traffic. The PLR Videos site was getting a good overall sales conversion of 3%++ and it was very profitable too.

My ads were all getting good CTR, my landing page scores was between 7 to 10. I never got any ads disabled or any warning from Google previously, for six years.

So basically even though I wrote good ads and promoted stuff people wanted, with results to prove it, Google thinks otherwise.

Did I go against some of their terms and conditions? Well I don’t know because they are so vague and subjective.

And the worst part, they selectively applied their bans. Any product I was promoting when I got banned, you’ll still see a lot of people promoting similar ones via AdWords.

After trying to get in touch with a human being (with a name) and failing, I finally decided I’m done with AdWords. In fact I’m done with any Google product that required me to be in business with them. That’s why although I got approved for the Google Affiliate Network, I completely ignored it.

Won’t they just do the same thing to me later? Ban me for life, treat me like a rabid unwanted dog? All three responses I got from them were the same vague, canned answers that never really told me exactly what they found so offensive with my ads that they had to slap a lifetime ban.

Actually I’m not alone. Apparently more than 15,000 direct marketers got similar emails, all of them banned for life. If you’re not banned by AdWords yet, it’s probably just a matter of time.

Well, if Google prefers to treat human beings like machines with no human touch at all, sooner or later they will only be doing business with machines. Right now, I hate them.

Ok, rant is over. Life moves on. Screw Google.

Filed Under: Google AdWords Tagged With: , , , , ,
December 22, 2008 By

The Death of A Niche Market

A niche market may last forever, but the profitability of any niche market is mostly up to one company that is always the topic of discussion in any marketing seminar: Google.

Indeed, how much money you make in niche marketing is very directly influenced by Google’s ever changing policies for Google AdWords. It affects your Google AdSense earnings, your affiliate sales, and even your own product sales. Let me explain how.

Google’s AdWords program is where the advertisers pay lots of money to place ads on Google for their product. Some of these ads are displayed on the Google search engine itself, while an equally large portion is displayed on Google’s “content network”. The content network is made up of millions of websites belonging to the average Joe like you and me. We place a small code called “AdSense” on our websites so when our visitors click on our ads, we make money.

In summary, there will be no AdSense is there was no AdWords. The two are more related than you can think. Any policy change Google makes on either service effect the other. Sort of like twins.

Sometimes AdWords policy changes can mean that an entire niche market is effected and loses its profitability. An example below, where Google’s new policy disallows anyone selling “template sites for ad networks”.

google-tos

This means that if you produce web templates or blog themes for AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network or similar programs, you can no longer pay for traffic and make sales. That means, your affiliates lose out of a huge traffic source too. That also means, if you have a website showcasing such templates but monetizing it with Google AdSense, all of a sudden your clicks count for way less money than it used to.

You get up one day wondering “What happened?”. Why was I getting $1.00 per click for AdSense last month and now it’s barely $0.10? Since the most profitable websites or merchants for your site have been disallowed by Google in AdWords, your AdSense ads now show less targeted merchants, and you earn much less.

The answer is, Google. What can you do about it? Nothing except move on to a new niche.

It’s not healthy that so much of online marketing revolves around a few companies like Google, PayPal, eBay and ClickBank. Historically these companies don’t really understand online marketing as much as you’d expect them to. They have the power to kill off niche markets, especially those they don’t like or just don’t understand.

Filed Under: Google Adsense, Google AdWords Tagged With: , ,
October 22, 2008 By

PPC Classroom Review – Affiliate Marketing With Pay Per Click

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A few days back I had the chance to really go through my copy of PPC Classroom, and the first thing that caught my eye is the wide range of PPC and keyword research tools available to members. Besides that the course looks great, and it was developed from the collective knowledge of Anik Singal and Amit Mehta, who generated over 2.4 million in affiliate commissions last year from PPC marketing.

One thing I noticed about PPC Classroom is that it’s not an “ebook” – all the content is presented via web pages protected by the members area. This way they integrate the text / audio / video parts very well. Once there, you can select the different modules via a drop down menu or go through them one by one.

  • Forward: Hitting the Tipping Point to Super Affiliate Success
  • Module 1 – Market Research
  • Module 2 – Keyword Research and Building a Killer Profit Pulling Keyword List
  • Module 3 – Direct Linking, Landing Pages, and Your Own Affiliate Site
  • Module 4 – How to Set Up Your AdWords Campaign Properly
  • Module 5 – How to Design a High-Converting Landing Page
  • Module 6 – Understanding the Google Quality Score
  • Module 7 – Launching Your Campaign… Do You Have a Dud, or a Winner?
  • Module 8 – The Importance of Split Testing and How to Do it Correctly
  • Module 9 – Bid Optimization Strategies

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You can also take the PPC Classroom quiz after c going through the modules, and view your scores. If you pass a certain score you’ll receive certification from PPC Classroom – this is the incentive they give their members to not abandon the modules.

I’ve dabbled with Google AdWords since 2003 when there were very few advertisers, clicks were cheap and the program itself was very straightforward. But ever since, AdWords has become ever so more complicated with the introduction on Landing Page Quality Score and other metrics that makes PPC though, and risky, for the absolute beginner.

However the allure of being able to set-up an ad, pay for some clicks, and make money before you go back home from work is what makes PPC so darn attractive. PPC is definitely something you wouldn’t want to learn from “trial and error” as every mistake you make costs you money. If you have no idea what to do, when to do it and how to do it, you’re going to lose more than just pocket money.

If you’re thinking of getting PPC traffic to your blog, as I mentioned in Super Affiliate Blogger, I highly recommend you get at least the basic PPC Classroom course. They also have additional videos and “Behind the Scenes Bootcamp” which you may want to get if you’re truly serious about PPC.

Overall, the way PPC Classroom is done gives me inspiration to revamp the way I sell and design my own information products. Great stuff.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
February 27, 2008 By

Malaysia Election Campaigns Powered by Google Adwords

Looks like I am not the only Internet marketing expert, now even political websites are using Google Adwords PPC advertising to drive traffic to their Malaysia election campaign websites. Type in "Malaysia" or "election" in Google and you might see something like this:

malaysia-election It’s interesting to note however that the ads are only from opposition parties. The ruling party on the other hand still thinks that the Internet is for playing games and chatting.

However the ads are not targeted and all visitors are sent to the main page. Anyone familiar with Google Adwords knows that doing this is just a waste of money, but I guess these guys have a lot of money right now to burn.

Someone is obviously getting rich by helping the political parties to market their election websites and messages via the Internet.

Maybe they should hire me as their Internet marketing consultant…?

But the sites themselves are quite ok, with a blog-style layout and also the incorporation of videos.

malaysia-elections

They should be driving traffic to those page or better still a targeted page where users can find out venues and other stuff, not the general home page where the user doesn’t know what to do next. If I was doing Google Adwords advertising like this I’m sure I would go bankrap by now :)

I guess this is really the final frontier for Internet marketing in Malaysia – when politicians start using it for the election campaigns!

Filed Under: Computers and Internet Tagged With: , ,