I became a GAP Qualified Professional about 18 months ago (passed exam back on 4/14/06) and have been proudly displaying the credential (and the link to my pro page) on my site for the last two years - without incident, post it and forget it. Imagine my suprise when earlier this week I was checking my GAP page and received this redirect url error: https://adwords.google.com/select/urlerror.html. Now I was pretty perplexed by this and considering I really had no idea what the problem was (I hardly ever check the page) I immediately visited the Google Advertising Professionals support page and after telling them my problem on Tuesday -- I received this lovely gem from a "Derrick" at Google today: "I understand you are unable to view your Google Advertising Professional logo. This is because we have temporarily suspended your account after detecting unauthorized access to your account. Based on this, we believe that your computer, any computer used to access your account, and/or any computer used to click on your ads may have been surreptitiously infected with and compromised by malicious software ('malware'). Your account has been temporarily suspended while we investigate." What the %&@*%#? Has anyone ever experienced this problem. This sounds like some canned explanation that has no relevance to the question at hand - why has Google taken down my GAP pro page? They urged me to run software to find the problem and SHOCKINGLY there was no problem. My computer and all the computers here in the office are fine - we used Spyware Doctor and Norton - no problems. It get's better, further down the message they say this: "If you would like to continue advertising while we are investigating please create a new account after you checked your computer for malware as instructed above. Please make sure to use a different password for the new account. Reply to this email with your new account customer ID, and we will waive the activation fee for your new account." Again, what the %&@*%#? Are they saying I have to set-up an entirely new account and then resubmit to the GAP program all together? Its pretty funny really, I ONLY log-in and manage my client accounts through my Google Master Client Center - I never go to the individual accounts themselves. That's also the only way to view your "Pro Center" and I still have full-access to that account AND thus all client accounts linked into it as well. So the "your account has been suspended" is even that much more confusing in hindsight since I have been in making changes all day? Has anyone experienced this kind of problem with their GAP page or any problems with their GAP pages at all for that matter? Its pretty ridiculous and if someone can shed some light on this complete cluster@#$% by Google, I am all ears! And pardon the language .
So you would be happy if they detected unauthorized access and did nothing about it? They're just taking proper precautions to prevent unauthorized use of their clients account. Have you contacted them via phone or email to let them know everything is ok?
Please, you try to reach Google by phone....good luck. And yes, I am still in contact with them via email. Further, explain this to me, if they were so "concerned" about my account in the first place why didn't they take the initiative and contact ME when they detected this "unauthorized access" initially? Again, I have no idea how long the page has been down so this problem could have been active for at least a week...but Google didn't feel the need to contact me once (until I started sending emails this week) during the outage. If you want to defend Google great, but at least admit their customer service is abyssmal. I am still awaiting contact from my reply to their GAP support reply email above...I won't hold my breath.
Sounds to me like the guy who responded to you doesn't know what he's talking about, especially if you can actually still log in to your account.
I just discovered the same problem yesterday and also got the same canned response from Google. Of course I already have all of the preventative software running on all of our computers and we only log on to our adwords account about once a month. So this was not caused by our logging in- our last log in was way before our account was suspended. Have you received any resolution Superbitz? Thanks for any information you can share as the holiday season is gearing up and we would like to have our ads back up and running ASAP.
I talk to them all the time. Their customer service isn't the best in the world but I wouldn't call it abysmal... Anyway, I'm not defending anyone just saying how would you feel if they detected something weird with your account and did nothing about it? About 3 weeks ago I made a $2,700 purchase online and my credit card company flagged the transaction as fraudulent and denied the charges. The credit card company didn't tell me anything, the merchant called me up to let me know the charge was declined. I called my credit card company, verified the charge was legit and all was good. I was ticked about having to make the extra call but would have been more ticked if the charge really was fraudulent and they let it go through.
No luck lifestar, they still haven't replied to my response from last week. I have no idea what is going on here. I already took down my GAP link on my website and I am not going to worry about it right now. I have plenty of business as it is, I will just have to take a wait and see approach. If you hear something though, definitely make sure you PM me as well. We will keep in touch.
I think there was indeed a problem with your account!!! But even i'm astonished they din't inform you before blocking....
I'd have to agree with GuyFromChicago, AdWords support is fantastic. Why not give them a call? Almost every issue I have had with support has been resolved on the phone and if not, they look int it and call me back within hours. I would agree that email replies are often canned, that's why I don't use email support anymore. Regarding your problem, I would be happy they are looking into it for you. I would suggest that you look into it yourself. Notice any unusual activity? Look at your DELETED campaigns. It has happened to me before, a long time ago.
I tried contacting google before and until now I didn't get any respond from them. I don't believe they know anything about customer service. I guess they don't need people
Call them. Sending an e-mail is the most half-assed lazy mans way to get an issue resolved I can think of.
I usually e-mail them. I suppose I should probably expect the half-assed lazy answer that they usually send back...
UPDATE: GAP page back online as of today 11/7 -- problem has been fixed. Took me a week but apparently this was a "glitch" which has finally been corrected. Of course I had to change all the log-in info for 7 different ADWORDS accounts but hey, whatever...