Google Adwords

I have a little story to tell you.

As you may know, I sell a product called Seamless Texture Generator. This application, written in Blitzplus, allows you to quickly and easily create seamless textures from photos.

I advertise this product on computer graphics sites with Google Adwords. Each month, I put 50% of my profits towards more advertising. Lately this has been to the tune of $500.

I have also experimented with the different advertising models Google provides. Sometimes this results in unintended consequences, like back in Feburary when sales plummeted suddenly after I switched over to a new advertising model in December called Pay Per Action, and set my bid on "Download of Demo" too low.

Now, as of last month, I was running a pay per click campaign on one website, and a pay per action campaign where the action was "Purchase". The way this action worked was when a user bought my software through share*it, they would see a confirmation page, and this page would contain google's advertising code. If said user also had a browser cookie they received after seeing my ad, then the website which displayed that ad would get a whopping $15... half the price of my product.

This setup worked great through March, April, and May. I knew that every dollar of my advertising money was being well spent.

Or at least, that was the theory.

In reality, I was a bit concerned that the number of actions being reported didn't actually match the number of sales I made. But at the same time, what I was being charged for each of these actions was not $15, but rather some lower amount, roughly half that, which varied. I'd asked Google about this but they gave me their standard line and said their algorithms wer flawless. I didn't agree with this, but since Google wasn't charging me more than that $500 I wanted to budget for sales each month, I continued to run the campaign. What other choice did I have?

Flash forward to June, and suddenly I get hit with a second $500 charge to my account just two weeks after the last one occured. This brings my total advertising cost for the past four weeks up to $1000, and completely destroys my bottom line.

When I discover this, I check my advertising stats, and find that at the end of May Google suddenly had started recording twice as many Purchase actions as they had been previously. I do a test order on Sahre*It and find that the code is still listed once as it should be, but while Share*It recorded that I made only 9 sales during that period, Google claimed 54 copies had been sold... 6x the number which actually occured.

Being the smart fellow I am, I determined that the only way Google could legitimately claim to have recorded 6x as many actions as actual purchases took place would be if their code were executed six times for each purchase. But running that test order I discovered the code was listed only once, and contacting Share*It support about the issue, they confirmed this to be the case as well.

Thus the only possible reamining excuse Google could use in this scenario would be that each user had viewed the page more than once. And that would be all well and good... if not for the fact that, while BEFORE the disparity between purchases and actions was small, NOW each user would have to have reloaded the purchase confirmation page SIX TIMES, and any reasonable person can see that that is patently absurd.

Contacting Google about this, they of course denied any responsibility, claimed there was no problem with their system, and refused to issue a refund. Not being deterred by this initial brush off, I again presented them with facts and figures which backed up my position, and they agreed to have someone look into it. Which is all well and good, except... didn't they have someone look into it in the first place when I told them there was a problem and they told me there was no problem?

After "looking into it" of course, they came back with the same answer: No. Meanwhile, they were losing money due to my Pay Per Action campaign being paused, and I informed them of this, and the fact that I've spent close to $7000 advertising through them over the past few years.

Continuing my assault over the course of the next month, I asked to speak to a manager, and presented more facts to back up my position. No managerial contact was provided, no problem no matter how slight was admitted, no refund issued.

I offered them my server logs demonstrating that their tracking of my demo downloads was off as well. They displayed no interest. I requested their server logs proving these accesses occured. They simply ignored the requests rather than refusing outright to provide the information.

Finally, I told them that if I did not get a refund in a few days that I would be initiating a chargeback of the contested amount on my Visa card. A week later, today actualy, after I had already begin the chargeback process with my bank, I finally got an email from a manager who said she would like to call me tomorrow to speak with me. A manager, who, going by her failure to master the english language, was yet another Indian call center worker, in no real position of power, in disguise.

Only one problem. The number she listed that she'd call me back was out of date... Well, no biggie. I informed her of this and went to update my contact information on my adwords account.

When I clicked my Account Info tab in my adwords account however, I was in for a surprise. It seems that back on the 3rd of July, Google credited my adwords account for $650 as one of their routine adjustments for fraudulent clicks. Of course, their support staff never informed me that this occured, and even their manager appeared to have no clue about this turn of events. And of course this occured the same day initiated the process with my bank to contest the charges, a process I did not undertake lightly as it would result in my card being deactivated and a new card being issued.

So in the end, I was right, they were wrong, their support staff never admitted they were wrong, and apparently never issued a refund themselves. A refund was issued, apparently, by a computer, somewhere deep in the google compund, with no human at the helm. Google's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing, yet all is well with the world once more, somehow.


Oh, and I called my bank to cancel the refund request, which the call center staffer cheerfly said they would be happy to do.

Then a few hours later I get an email from my bank saying that not only indicated the action had not been cancelled but that if I wanted to contest the charges I would need to... provide them with a contract where Google specified I'd make more than 9 sales?!

WHAT

Hm, that's a bit long isn't it? :-)

When companies get too big you might as well forget communicating with them, it's just a waste of time, a different person every time, passed form pillar to post. Anyway glad you got some money back in the end.

no kidding you say you are the famous maker of Seamless Texture Generator? :P

it was damn looooong swift, what could have made you write such a long post? Hot for words decides to investigate! D:

haha, interesting story, swift, are you going to continue with adwords? ;)

I lost $800 to Google, told them they would never ever see that money, and never went near them again.

Maximo:

1. Surprising isn't it?

2. ANGER.

3. Yes, but one thing I forgot to mention, and which Google forgot to mention as well, is that Google is discontinuing the Pay Per Action campaigns come the end of August. I WONDER WHY.

Given that... While I will continue using the service, for example to advertise my game when it is complete, I will only be using it to advertise on cgtextures.com from this point forward unless they implement some new advertising program which is more suitable than pay per click.

I think a large part of the problem is that so many people try to 'game' adsense and adwords, to profit in an undeserved fashion. Google have adopted a policy of defensive cynicism as a result, so that genuine issues end up being ignored.

yeah there's the whole "Internet Marketing" approach of "click flipping" etc.

I had an issue with Google Adwords a year or two ago, don't remember what it was, but they almost instantly credited me with $25. Not much, but I didn't spend much at adverts.

cheers
Roman

I'm surprised you have any money left, sswift. Seems an awful lot of money to spend on a niche program like STG. I thought ads on relevant sites like gamedev was the thing to do.

Yeah but he's worked it out so that the money he spends always generates a bigger return, which is fair enough :-)

Mark:

Actually, I'm spending exactly the right amount of money. The law of diminishing returns says that the optimial amount of money to spend on advertising is 50% of your profits.

generally, so as long as you're not spending more than 50% of your profits on advertising, you're not spending too much, and in fact, you might want to increase what you're spending.

That does assume however that every advertising dollar you spend increases your sales by the same amount.

I advertise on cgtextures.com for example, and there google tells me I'm not receving 85% of the impressions I could be receiving... But since that site shows a banner with every texture a user clicks, showing my ads 100% of the time would show the same ad to the same user ten times, when once might be sufficient. And indeed, from what I could tell from crunching my sales figures, spending more than $8 a day advertising on that site would actually reduce my profits.

But when it comes to Pay Per Action, you can't spend too much. I was paying 50%, the optimal amount, only when a sale was made. So if I ended up spending $2000 a month that just means I sold a hell of a lot of copies (though that never happened) and therefore made $2000 in profit.

For pay per impression style campaigns though, or pay per click, like the cgtextures site, it comes down to adjusting the advertising revenue up and down until you find the sweet spot where you're spending 50% of your profits on advertising. That's the point where your profits are maximized.

There's a mathematical formula which proves that, but I don't remember it.

Ah right, thanks for the explanation. I thought you were just throwing money at Google for random ads on their search engine pages.

I had some pretty wild success with pay per click Adwords a while back when selling some DVDs. You had to carefully balance it and watch it each day as things seemed to change over time. Plus A/B testing on the ad wording of course.