Google Adwords Drops The Axe Again

It appears that Google Adwords has done another round of banning of accounts with very little information other then a simple email that says that your account has been banned.

I know this because I received dozens of emails from my customers telling me that they had received the dreaded “You’ve Been Banned By Google” emails over the last week.

The problem with these emails is that they don’t tell anyone why they have been banned.  Calling or emailing Google Adwords to find out why is a bigger waste of time then watching a Lindsay Lohan movie.

They are not responding or answering any questions and I have yet to hear of anyone who has been banned ever getting their account reinstated.

This ban has not been limited to people running rebill offers but rather a mix of accounts promoting anything from Clickbank products, CPA offers, poor landing pages, own products etc.

In fact, I heard that a company that had been spending one million dollars a year with Google Adwords selling their own coffee product was banned without explanation.

I have yet to receive one of these emails, but I fully expect to if they are targeting advertisers running poor quality CPA offers (i.e email submits).

I am offender “numero uno” when it comes to promoting email submit CPA offers on Google Adwords.

Here is who they are nailing:

1. Offer Does Not Offer A “Good User Experience”

If you are running any sort of offer that Google deems not to provide their users with a “good user experience” according to Google’s judgement, they can ban you.

2. Rebill Offers

If you try to run a rebill offer (i.e. Acai, Biz Op), you risk the chance of having your account banned.  I have even heard that if you had run a campaign like this in the past that may be paused or deleted, they can still ban you.

3. Guilt By Association

If you have ever or had anyone log into a shady or banned Google Adwords account from your IP address,  you run the risk of having your account banned because Google targets all Google Adwords accounts that have ever been accessed by that same IP address.

Now, it isn’t that hard to open a new Adwords account, but it does require a bit of work.

1. Get a new computer

2. Get a new IP address

3. Open a new Adwords account under a new name and new credit card with a different name and address (i.e. mother-in-law?)

With the above being said, it appears that affiliate marketing on Google Adwords is dying a slow death and pay per click marketers need to start evolving their businesses outside of Google Adwords.  Also exploring other traffic courses such as media buys, ppv, natural seo, viode marketing, etc. doesn’t hurt either.

Google represents just a small fraction of the traffic available online.

At one-time, my monthly advertising budget with Google Adwords represented about 70% of my online budget.  Scary eh?  I have now brought this down to about 15% and will now never allow one traffic source to be more than 20% of my monthly budget.

I myself will not be content until my monthly ad spend with Google is just about 10% of my total monthly ad spend.

I have been working heavily expanding out with other pay per click search engines and pay per view traffic sources for the last two weeks.

I can understand Google Adword’s wanting to give their users a “good user experience”, but the manner in which they are offending their advertisers who have helped build their company is astonishing.

It appears that they don’t give a crap.

I have started moving my advertising dollars elsewhere.  I don’t have to deal with this unbelievable arrogance with other companies that sell paid traffic.

If Google simply worked with their customers to clean up poor advertisements (i.e. removing flogs, etc.), they would still have a lot of loyalty from their advertisers.

All good things come to an end.

When Google runs into hard times, they won’t regret the policies they put into place, but rather the manner in which they treated their advertisers when implementing them.

Any comments?