Hello, Back before the first of the year I opened a Google Adwords account to try my hand at affiliate marketing. This was the first adwords account I've ever opened and I used prepay and loaded it with $200. I found a product on Click Bank (a World of Warcraft guide) and built a landing page (http://www.bestwowguide.info/wowlevelingguide.html), then I created a campaign and one ad to test out. Days went by and the ad never showed, I never got any impressions. I used the ad diagnostic tool and got the error that my daily budget had been exceeded. I played around with the budget amounts over a period of a couple weeks, the traffic estimator said my costs would be between $9 and $20 a day, so I set a $25 daily budget and nothing. I finally found a number to call adwords support (I had sent 3 email support requests over a period of 2 weeks and never got a response) and the rep said she would email me back within 24 hours. When I got a reply from her it simply said that my account was suspended indefinitely and told me how to process my refund. I asked why it was suspended and she said she couldn't tell me, only that Google has the right to suspend any account at any time for any reason. Does anyone have an idea why this happened? I'd like to experiment more with Adwords but don't want to go through this hassle again. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Were you bidding on copyrighted terms? Did your site contain a keylogger, adware, spyware? WoW is a huge target for the above things so Google would watch out for cruddy landing pages or possible phishing sites.
This might be it, one of my keywords was originally world of warcraft. I took it out when I was fiddling with the budget because it was estimating a huge number of clicks for that term. You'd think they'd be able to tell me what I did wrong... All my payment details and signup info was legit, there was no phishing or scamming on the landing page, just some sales copy, adsense ads, an aweber form and my affiliate link.
mbrameld: did you ever figure out what the problem was? I have the same thing going on with my account...
This has happened to me and a great many people I know. After over a year with no problems Google shut down my Google Checkout account. Reason as far as I can figure was I had a couple buyers from Nigeria try and use hot credit cards on my website. I did not know them and they did not get away with any product. A few months later my Adwords account where I spent over $1800 a month and had not had any problems was also shut down. I have spent many hours and over a couple months time to find out what and why is going on and have not learned anything new. Most of my emails are never responded to and the ones that are refer me to the Google help center where there is hunderds of people trying to find out why they were canceled. I know this will be hard for most of you to belive but Google bans customers for little or no reason and there is nothing you can do about it. And yes they lose a lot of income from this pratice but they do not seem to mind the losses at all. Maybe they are getting bailout money to cover the loss.
Google suspended many peoples accounts, see this post here: http://adzzoo.com/blog/2009/08/your-google-adwords-account-is-suspended/comment-page-1/#comment-73 I was one of them too
Greetings, I think I can shed light on this matter for you. Please be advised that The Goog HATES, HATES, HATES, affiliate marketing, and the especially hate CB marketing. To understand why please take the time to look at the world through their eyes and consider the following questions: 1) Are you the first person in the world who has ever tried to do exactly what you say you have tried to do? (very probably not) 2) Assuming that you and 50 other people were doing exactly the same thing at the same time, and further assuming that each of you had chosen the same keywords (let's assume one of them was "world of warcraft"), and then then somebody did do a search for that keyword, what do you think the results page would look like when it came up? What would happen is that the user would see the usual listing of natural results and then on the right hand side of the page he or she would see a long list of paid search results with different but similar offers all related to world of warcraft. Now, when that person clicked on any of the ads he or she would end up on a CB offer page. If that user backed out of that and then clicked on a different link on the list of paid results he would end up BACK on the exact same page as before only with a different hop link. Then if he or she repeated that over and over again they would find that no matter which paid link they clicked on, they would always end up on the same page and therefore; from their point of view there would be no all these paid search links are THE SAME, they look like they come from the same organization. That is exactly what the goog wants to avoid, an erosion in the perceived value of the experience of the actual user. From the view point of the user all those paid links are a waste of time because they seem like they all go "to the same place". In the parlance of the paid search ad business this is "brand dilution". So, now you know.