Been a big Google user for the about the last five years but over the last six months really having a terrible experience and now moving on to other services/building replacements. The main reason behind why Google is awful is the total lack of customer service. Nobody you can call and vague email notices that do not explain anything. They have the money to pay for customer service representatives but choose not to. Be hopeful that you never need support for any of Google services. Some of my experiences below with different Google services below Google - Apps Have setup many Google apps accounts in the past for various companies. Decided to setup a new one the setup went well used it for a week. Then a week later tired to login into the main admin account mistyped/didn't remember the password tried three times then said account disabled. Didn't think anything about it at time maybe a normal security check so decided I would wait it out thinking it would be 15 minutes to an hour to restore. A day later finding out the account still was locked was puzzled but decided to use the password reset option but found out shortly that nothing happened and didn't matter since the account was disabled. Next step was to figure out who to contact quickly found out there is no phone support unless you are using the paid version. But in addition to no phone support, there is no email support. The only support is a Google forum where you can post your site and ask for help and hopefully a google staffer would find it. Didn't sound like the route I wanted to go. Tired making a post there but didn't hear any response for a couple days. So luckily found an online form for Google apps that I could fill out. Filled out the form explaining the situation they responded with said my account was disabled and to post in the forum. Already did that so kept filling out the form and started to email back and forth. Took about a couple days to find why the account was disabled and it was due login attempts which I still thought was strange to disabled the account completely with no reset time option. If that could happen to me what would prevent another user doing it to another Google apps customer. Eventually went back and forth and finally they did get the account unlocked so we could login took about two weeks. The time it took did have impact since I couldn't add user accounts or get the domain setup for the client. My advice on anyone starting a google apps account to make two admin accounts in case you are locked out of one of them. Google - Adwords Have used adwords for many years and have been setting up accounts for clients and own companies. Setup a new company, new site, new service hosted software as a service system. professionally done website, privacy policy, 800 number. Created the adwords account with the company information. Added billing information. Created the ads, choose are demographics and bidding. Started with a budge of a couple hundred per day. Focusing on just the Google search engine not content sites for ad placements. Added the keywords and ads. Looked at our landing page quality score was at a seven out of ten to start. A couple days later we find the account disabled for no reason with only a couple ad impressions. Decided to contact support and they said account was under review First email: Dear Advertiser, We're sorry to hear that you're experiencing difficulties with your AdWords account. It appears that your account is under review. Our Specialists already know about this issue, and an investigation is underway. We periodically review accounts for security purposes and to verify billing information. We'll send you an update after the investigation is complete, typically within three business days. Ok fine understand reviewing new accounts double checked our billing information to make sure. Couple days later get another vague email saying account is suspended due to terms of service reasons without any reasons. As mentioned earlier your account was under review. After reviewing your account, it has come to our attention that your Google AdWords account does not comply with our Terms and Conditions. As a result, your account, and any related accounts you may have created, have been suspended, and your ads will no longer run on Google. As you may recall, the Terms and Conditions to which you agreed to when you signed up for AdWords state that Google reserves the right to review and stop running any ads when deemed necessary. You can review these Terms and Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder. NEXT STEPS - Please refrain from creating any new accounts, as they will be subject to the same suspension. - For privacy reasons, AdWords Support is unable to provide any additional information regarding this account. Just great they can't tell me anything else or what terms of service part the account violated nor can I setup any more accounts. Seems like Google does not want any money or business. This has a huge impact for a new company starting out in our case there was no good reason our competitors have ads on Google and we were not doing anything different. Had a corporation, corp credit card on the account, our 800 number and Google ended up disabling the account. After that decide maybe if see we can find someone to talk to instead of these automated canned response replies which go nowhere. Adwords actually has a phone number but they hide it as best they can. Upon dialing you get to a simple menu system that asks for your account id number. Upon entering you just get prompted to use their online system and then it hangs up. Tired again using the menu system for the operator when we tired in the middle day on the weekday there was no one there. Just amazes me that Google which is a marketing company and primary income is the adwords system has no phone sales department to handle new accounts or online phone support. Google is not a small company it is a multibillion dollar corporation there is no excuse for it. Contrast this to Bing/Microsoft which you can do online chats/instant message. Call up for sales/support and have support setup and optimize your ad campaign. Receive follow-up calls asking how it is going and follow-up emails on the changes made with your campaigns and the impact they have. The most that Google offers is automated suggestions with adwords which are not very helpful. The only shame for Bing system is they do not nearly have the search engine traffic that google has. Sadly with the google search monopoly that won't change any time soon and if you want to do paid search engine marketing google is where it is at. Google - AdSense Had been a large adsense client generating six figures with AdSense with over a billion ad impressions. My industry deals with a lot of user generated content/forums/websites. Which is very hard to control unless you preapprove every message/item posted which kind of defeats purpose of having real time content. Google now sends out warning messages/disables ad serving for spam posts made on your websites. Have had entire domains blocked due to user content/spam posts even though took many steps on my own to prevent the posts and tried to appeal and for services that are adsupported that is almost a death sentence unless you have another ad provider to pickup the place.Had used popular antispam plugins, recaptha googles own service though now almost worthless, stopforumspam,projecthoneypot, own custom filtering system for keywords,ips,email. Sample email with no way to reply: adsense-noreply@google.com Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites in your network. VIOLATION(S) FOUND: COMMENT SPAM: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. While we understand that it may be challenging to monitor user-generated content, such as comments, on your site, we require publishers to check that the webpages containing their ad code complies with our program policies Then with their warning issues they say you have three days notice to make changes or adservering/account will be disabled. Which seems almost no warning if you can't check your email or on vacation or something happens you basically are held hostage to having an internet connection to make sure you can correct any issue. If they can detect violations why can't they just not have the ads show up on that page. The worst part about the violation emails is they are vague they send you one url but state there are maybe other violations on other pages that is all fine if you have a small site. But if you have multiple websites inside an AdSense account and hundreds of thousands of pages that becomes and issue and gives no clear indication to problems for publishers. Any issue that had been reported to us in the past was fixed within 24 hours and when we found that the account was disabled we were pretty upset. Considering the history how old the account, the number of impressions severed. Tried to appeal wrote a long discussion but received "Thanks for your email. However, please be aware that because your account was found to violate our program policies and was disabled, you are no longer eligible to participate in the AdSense program. " Nothing else no explanation on what policy was broken and lost a whole month of ad revenue since it was disabled near the end of the month. I was just shocked that nothing else was stated or worked out since we were a long time publisher. From what I can tell it seems like Google wants to get out of the publisher side of AdSense since they only get about 30% of the revenue. Hoping one day that Microsoft/Bing starts their own publisher network it was a shame when Yahoo Publisher network since there are very few decent alternatives out there. That's my current feedback/experience with Google just make sure you have multiple options that you can use. Wondering if anyone else has similar options or experiences.
I've heard similar stories from other people. Until there are viable alternatives though, it'll just keep quietly happening until the internet magically becomes spam-free and everyone fits Google's TOS. Or until enough large advertisers and publishers get hit and it gets noticed.
Well, if you are going to complain you should have valid concerns and you certainly do. unfortunately they just about have a monopoly.
Just like people having different opinions and point of views, they have different satisfaction. Nothing can really please everything..
The automated stuff that happens can be annoying, but with a little persistence I've found that they're really helpful.