I signed up to the forums to get this frustration across: Now this can't of been happening for long, my conversions had dried up for the past two days. Previously I hadn't been testing my ads in real-time.... they all worked on preview in adwords editor of course.... however when i clicked on any of my campaigns links after searching it in google... none of them went to the desired page.. they all went to an intermediate type of page which shows a white background and button continue... a quick flash appears in the address bar: results.googleadservices.com before the browser automatically changes to another RANDOM website. It went on Ebay, BBC, some other search portals with sponsored links... So needless to say I paused all of my campiagns and wrote to google. I wonder how much money I have lost on this and how long it has gone on for?? Have you heard of this? Furthermore if you want to see what I am talking about: Search in a google domain - 'how to grow grapes' or 'how to grow tomatoes'... go to the sponsoered link highlighted in yellow at the top of the web results... (not the right hand side) - and then see what I mean.
is google having problems in general, because this is happening to all sorts of sponsored ads... my guess is - if google has to recalculate links (ie - hoplink to general page) then it has trouble right now. I say this because a couple of times it took 5 or 6 pages (as seen in my browser back button history list) for it to get to the final random page (nowhere near the intended sponored advertised link). If going direct to a page it seems ok and normal. funny thing is, if i searched growing tomatoes lets say - the next link i click on (whatever it is - for instance how to sleep better) - http://wondertabs.com/?qq=growing%20tomatoes - is what came up (the browser is remembering the tomatoes????) - and needless to say the sleep webpage does not materialise. I have tried on multiple browsers... how weird... is it global problem??
Not seeing your problem but just tried a few sites at random and about 70% are returning an error message, Actually, I do not use Google as a search tool all that often but when I have in the last couple of months I am seeing this message with increasing frequency. Not sure what to make of it and just hope I do not miss out on too much as a result. I presume that we (advertisers) do not get charged (no obvious change in the ratio of traffic to clicks) but what really concerns me is that the average punter will think it is my site that is at fault rather than Google, i.e. How much damage is this doing to my site's reputation and goodwill?
70% cannot be good (infact it is horrendous!) however, I tried the searches on an unbiased computer, just reloaded and free of any adware..etc... the results seem to be fine - however in trying to resume my campaign - I could not bring up any of MY ads...? I waited 20 minutes... how long does it take for google to respond to my changes? This will affect ppc for sure... how can it not? Especially if there are no trend changes in stats...
Just tried again and still failing to connect on more than 50% of ads! Quite worrying! (BTW, I always surf "clean", i.e. adblocker, no cookies (with a few session exceptions), no cache, and everything cleared on closing.)
i wonder if this is a google.co.uk domain problem as opposed to .com, i see your from scotland.. I'm just going to have to wait until it gets sorted... i wonder if they will have to mass refund people
Still seeing the problem today but probably only 15-20% failing to connect. It does seem slightly more of a problem on .co.uk but since they both appear to return the same results these days I don't know if there is any relevance there.
Im very disappointed, google have not got back to me after I filed two queries to them via my adwords campaign user panel. What to do? Do they not respond to relatively small businessmen... My father says they can penalise you if they suspect you are loopholing them and they do not even tell you if they blight your campiagn in any way... !?!
Since a poster at another forum convinced me that Google are actually worse than Paypal (which I still find hard to believe but am prepared to accept) I have never tried contacting Google. The concensus seems to be that it is a waste of time. BTW, still having the same problem with about 15% of ads failing to connect.
to be more precise, this is the page google took me to: http://search5.info.co.uk/how to grow grapes?cmp=1707&affiliate=10727 ?!?!? not my clickbank hoplink !! YI searched for grape growing in google. My link is the top one in that site about growing grapes