I know, the TOS are clear where it says that Google can ban an account at their sole discretion, but HEY... it doesn't means that's right! So, I'm another person who Google has swindled. I know, $15 aren't that much, but HEY, $15 are fifteen bucks! This is my story: On November 25 I got an email giving me an AdWords promotional code for $50 that would expire on December 31. Since I wanted to promote my site (the one on my sig.), I rushed all December to have it finished before the coupon expired. On Dec. 31 I signed up on AdWords (chose the prepaid method), paid the $15 ($5 for signup and $10 is the minimum payment for my country) and was told that my coupon code was sucessfully added but I had to wait. So I waited. Later I got an email telling me that they received my $10 payment. I logged in but I could only see the $10 from the payment; the $50 of the coupon code were missing. I contacted google and instantly I got an email telling me that my account was under revision. A day later I got another email telling me that my accounts (? why in plural; I only have ONE account) don't meet the TOS and therefore, they were suspended. I was like WTF? so I re-read the TOS for my country (Guatemala), found nothing that my account were not complying to and contacted them again, asing which part of the TOS my account wasn't meeting to. They replied me few minutes ago, here's the message (translated by me; the original is in Spanish): I am not angry, but I am sad and disappointed because I, as many other users, expected something better from Google. If this continues, I don't anticipate a good future for them: Microsoft and Yahoo are real threats, and they know how to treat customers. What puzzles me, is that I have an adsense account with the same email and I didn't got banned from AdSense!?!
My dealings with the ad networks are different that most people's because I work for an agency - this does mean that Google are more accessible - but Yahoo bend over backwards, they can't do enough for you, the customer service is excellent. But do you know why? It's because you're completely wrong about this "Microsoft and Yahoo are real threats" - Google has the big numbers, unless you're in a quite exceptional part of the world, Yahoo and Microsoft combined will only ever deliver a tiny fraction of the paid or unpaid traffic of Google.
Completely right once again Magda. > I know, the TOS are clear where it says that Google can ban an account at their sole discretion, but HEY... it doesn't means that's right! Whether YOU think they are right or not is beside the point. If you want to use Adwords (or do business with any other entity for that matter), you must follow their rules or suffer the consequences.
Yes, I understand that, but I did not do anything against the tos. I don't know if you misunderstood me but this is what happened: 1. I got a $50 voucher 2. I signed up to use the voucher and paid $15 3. I did NOTHING ELSE 4. I got banned Although they have a tos to support them, if you analize the facts you'll find out that is a disguized robbery what they did to me. Imagine that instead of paying $10 I would have paid $100! If this happened to me then it could have happened to anyone else, including you.
I see, this becomes a problem lastly. Our account was also banned with no explanation. The only thing possible we did wrong is submitted a Credit Card, and by mistake confused billing and business addresses. The card was never used with any AdWords accounts before. Received the same message as the topicstarter, and since then the support is not reacting. Really strange. It is interesting, whether anybody from Google reads this topic to comment the issue.
Well, you must have done *something* they don't like. You say you did nothing but did you create some ads? Just want to be clear on what you mean by nothing. Was this your first account or did you open others before?
Yes, and it is a good plan. Force advertisers that don't offer any value to use the other PPC providers thereby increasing google's overall value (and decreasing the competitors). Your site does not have any content. actually, the only thing I see is adsense links to other 'learn german sites', they probably don't like that - no value.
I think where did u get the code from,from who,maybe the code was bad or corrupt so they may have banned all with that code?
I think anyway that maybe you're right. I re-read the records and found out that accidentally ran a campaign when I had much fewer content. Probably that's the reason. Thanks. Google emailed it to me.