- After trying to go through the “proper channels” for almost a year now it’s time to share this story of how Google screwed over our startup with the world.
Hatchlings is the world’s largest Easter Egg hunt. We have over 3.5 million users spanning all 50 states and almost every country on Earth. We have been in operation for over 4 years and are launching our new version, Hatchlings 2, this spring.
In a nutshell: Google bid on, displayed, and then failed to pay for over $40,000 of advertising space on Hatchlings. They have since stonewalled us for almost a year, locking us out of our accounts, screening our phone calls, ignoring our emails, and making it a living hell to figure out what exactly went wrong.
A few year ago I decided to try my hand at online advertising, so I put $20 in my adwords account and put up some PPC ads for a Clickbank ebook. Of course it went nowhere and I shut everything down and left it at that. A year or so later I was working for Microsoft adCenter support and we were preparing for the Microsoft & Yahoo! Search Alliance. Most of our calls involved transferring the customer's Google ads to adCenter as Google's formatting was more compatible with ours than Yahoo!'s and people usually kept their Google ads the most up-to-date. So I decided I would familiarize myself with Google's tools (mostly the adwords editor) and logged into my adwords account to find out that it had been banned. When I inquired I got the following answer:
I told them that I hadn't received any such notice and that even if I had the campaigns were deleted so the issue would have already been resolved. I then received an e-mail saying, So basically I was banned for every having had an ad run that they didn't like, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it or could have done about it. Having worked for adCenter I knew that if they were anything like us that there was in fact a lot of things you could do, but it all depended on how much you spent. At adCenter if you spent at least $2000 per month you would likely qualify to have an account representative who would be a permanent point of contact. This was the only way for you to get things like an invoiced account, access to things such as the adCenter API (though that's changed now), and your account reps had access to better analytics than your average support person. Companies at this level got away with a lot, nothing illegal mind you, just things that would get you kicked out of adCenter if you only spent, say, $500 a month. Some companies would argue over every click they got, withholding payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars for several months over a couple hundred worth of clicks they thought to be invalid. If your rep was smart enough they could even negotiate out some of the things in the terms and conditions you sign when you get an invoiced account (which any manager would've told you is impossible, but it wasn't). And that wasn't even the highest level of customer care you could get to. You see, for both Google and Microsoft, the majority of the money they make comes from a small percentage of their advertising customers. The people who spend the most spend so much more than anyone else. $40,000 over a two and a half month period is chump change for those people, and if they are willing to screw over people who pull in that kind of money, the rest of us don't have a chance in hell.Your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to one or more Landing Page and Site Policy violations. You should have received detailed notifications with the Customer ID and the Visible URL in violation, giving you the opportunity to make the necessary changes to the existing sites in your account. However, we confirm that the requested changes have not been made or were not sufficient because of which your account is suspended.
Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level suspension. In other words, pausing or deleting ads related to the disabled sites won't automatically re-enable the ads nor remove the violation history.