AdWordsReviews 245

I have been trying to resolve a basic administrative issue for three weeks. At least 15 different customer service representatives have told me that they have 'initiated my request' or that my request is 'under process' and that they have requested the advisor to call me back. I have not received one call from the 'advisor' or any member of customer service EVER. I have had to call every single time to initiate communication and chase for updates about the status of my request, which I need to explain from scratch every single time. This makes me want to scream into a pillow. No informative answer has ever been given to me, only a vague reassurance that they are addressing my issue but clearly, this is not happening. Utterly shocked at how bad this service is.

I wasted thousands of dollars, because so called google specialists helped me configure my Google adwords account 26 times, I tried to get compensated but they told me it was against their policy. I think they should specialize on how to configure Google adword accounts. The key words(814) that were applied to my account don't even pertain to my google merchant center and you get charged for some of the negative keywords. They out source their work to India, and it is very difficult to understand them, they should specialize on how to speak English. If I could give them zero star rating I would. The cost of the items that I listed were less or comparable to my competitors, I was getting a lot of clicks but no conversions. I could go on and on, but I'm tired. So I would seriously think about opening a Google adwords account.

Don't use adwords, unless you have larger than million business or have very good lawyer friends. Its not for personal or small business use. I guess they redirect all small clients to an outsourced call center, sometime I got phone call from them with an Australia area code or unknown caller ID. Those customer support team not capable understand or resolve small issues. I have a small amount prepaid credit on my adwords account, and they just terminated my account (rudely) because its inactive. So I try to get my remain credit back. First round, they said credit is send to local government, you should contact your local government directly to get your fund, and they won't tell you where and how? Second round, they said please send me PWC letter to get refund, you should contact PWC by yourself, and figure out a letter, and send that letter to me. That the google policy. I can't believe a so big company don't care their reputation at this level. Google maybe good at programming automated things, but they are so bad dealing with human issues. Maybe just because I'm a tiny client, they just don't care at all. Make your choice wisely!

Whatever you do folks, DO NOT Use Adwords. They charge for invalid clicks, they serve your ads to categories that have Nothing to do with your business, they serve your ads internationally even though you have clicked to serve only in the US, they even charged me for clicks when my account was set to inactive. Then, when I asked to speak with supervisors 8 times and was assured a response, NOTHING! The only people you can get to speak to is a call center in INDIA!, otherwise Google has perfected a huge impenetrable wall around themselves, you can speak with NO ONE! I disputed the charges with my bank and after months this evil Behemoth, submitted loads of false documentation and I was charged anyway. If your ad is up, anyone, including your competition and people who think it's funny, can click on your ad and leave even before the page loads and you're charged! ADwords is a TOTAL RIPOFF perpetrated by a company who's slogan used to be DO NO EVIL. I doubt there is one person left there that remembers that. I am going to sue you in small claims court here locally Google. DO NOT USE ADWORDS! You Will Be Sorry If You Do!

You have to install google analytic to know if a visitor coming from a google ads or not. Why should I give my visitor's privacy to Google?

It's Google's responsibility to show you which visitor is coming from Google ads click by which keyword, ads. This is a VERY SIMPLE question. Easy to implement in a query string, so your server access log will see that. However, it's very difficult to know it in Google, because if Google give you that information, they will earn NO money. They just don't want to let you know that, so they can add some fake clicks to earn money!

They usually give you some valuable visitors initially, then after couple days or weeks, Google will give you useless clicks( might be fake clicks, who knows, because NO REPORT! They simply increase the number in the report, but you see NO visitor! Great magic!) to see if you want to increase your bid or not, and because you increase your bid, your competitor will increase too. Till the end, you will see your bid increased to double or tripple from beginning, but same result. This is how Google make money. Google is a liar!

Also Google quality score is another joke. This is the truth, if you pay more to Google, your quality score would be better for whatever reason, Yes 10! Good customer! If you pay less, your quality score will be low. Yes 1! Bad customer! Yes, Same campaign! Nothing changed! It's just a kind of volume discount in advertising -- "Quality score" So don't waste your time to study landing page experience, Ads relevance. Just pay more money!

Don't trust their adwords report! Trust your own analysis, then you can win.

New to the whole thing? So was I. I thought I would use the $75 credit and shortly after setting up the Ads as per the onscreen instructions, received numerous marketing phone calls from exotic locations wanting me to buy into their stuff. What the heck!?!
2 30-minutes phone calls later, I was told this was due to the time zone wrongly attributed (what does that have to do with my phone number being used by marketers?). I properly set-up the ad with the help of a specialist and thought all would be good. How wrong was I...
An email notified me the next day my ad was suspended. Reason: Restricted drug terms... Another 30-minutes phone call later, I found out the issue was caused by as a client review saying she didn't need to use Ventolin after seeing me. I removed it from the reviews. And noticed $5.30 were already used from the budget.
2 days later, I receive the same email about my ad being suspended - again and for the same reason! Another phone call and the operator is totally useless and haughty. I am not using their services again and recommend you do the same to save your time, sanity and budget.

I set up most of my ad and phoned to simply give payment information and ask a few basic questions. The rep was such an utterly incompetent individual that what should have been a 5 minute phone call turned into an Odyssey of madness during which she accidentally created a second account and was floundering so badly that after an hour of this (literally over an hour) with no end in sight I asked to have BOTH shut down immediately and ended the call after getting that done.

Well the incompetent rep apparently didn't shut them down and I ended up getting billed in excess of 500.00 for accounts that were not authorized at any time to run.

Upon contacting Adwords it got worse. They would not return my money after they took it without authorization and against my direct request, opting instead to offer a credit against future use, as if I'd ever again hand my payment info to these people.

I thought Google was a great company. Instead my first experience as a customer resulted, IMO, first in incompetence and then in outright unethical behavior.

Horrid, horrid, horrid. Stay the heck away from these people.

Google, a billion dollar+ company, deems it necessary to cheap-out on their customer service, by hiring overseas people, who have different cultures and ways of processing English -- which leaves PAYING customers pulling their hair out, trying to make these non-native English speakers understand our support needs!

I am FED-UP with struggling to get decent support, any time I call -- and am thinking I have LOTS of company!

I'll be continually looking for a viable PPC alternative to this crappy monopoly called Google Adwords. When that finally happens, scores of people, including myself, will be happily firing Adwords, and never look back.

Things l learned about Google AdWords today... MAJOR SCAM ARTISTS!

So I received a promotional postcard that if I spent $50, I would get $100 in free AdWords credit. I thought, "I'll give it a try for $50 and see how it works".

What they don't tell you is that if you set a total budget ($50 for me), it means nothing. The ad continues to run, without your knowledge, until you go into the settings and stop the campaign.

Also, the daily budget you set for your campaign (for me $15 a day until my $50 runs out) means nothing. They can charge you up to double your daily budget in overages. Once again, they failed to tell me any of this on that little promotional postcard they sent. Their customer service agent just explained, "That's the way it works!".

Oh, and they can't connect you to anyone regarding the billing. They are just a "middle man" and can't accommodate that request.

SCAM, SCAM, SCAM!

I know Google Adwords works because Google runs the universe when it comes to SEO. However, the customer experience with Google Adwords reps is horrible. The first time I called my rep, I was asking a simple question about zip codes. She did not seem to know the answer because depending on how I asked it, she gave me the opposite answers. I kept prodding her to give me a definitive answer, but she would not. She kept pushing me to answer questions so she could set me up with a budget. I essentially hung up on her because we were getting nowhere. About a week later, she called my cell phone around 7pm while I was out to dinner with my family. She asked if I was at the computer so she could show me something. I told her no because it was after work hours. She seemed frustrated that I was not at my computer and tried to roll back into the increasing budget story and told me that my ad was "not showing". I checked the ad the next day and it had a nice number of impressions and 6 clicks, so obviously she was lying just to get me to increase the budget. A couple days later, I checked on the ad only to realize that the wording I had meticulously written had been replaced with some random sentence pulled from the website. I was so frustrated that we paid for clicks when it was not properly targeted so I picked up the phone to question Google. I purposefully did NOT call "my" rep. The person who answered the phone would not answer my question until I answered his budget questions (the same ones the rep had asked the week before). Extremely frustrating! I know they are trying to make money and increase budgets, but by shoving it down people's throats without helping them with their questions, you are not going to get more money.

I have used Adwords express for several clients who advertise locally and I've done this for several years with good results. This year has been a total waste of my clients money with absolutely NO ROI! The verified phone call set up is the worst! My client was getting wrong number calls constantly for several different businesses at all hours of the night. I'm wondering if the BBB might be able to help get our money back from these scammers? Has anyone tried suing Google yet? Maybe it's time for a class action against them because this is fraud.

I HAD A 10 MILE RADIUS SET UP AROUND MY BUSINESS. ONE OF THEIR ACCOUNT CONSULTANTS SAID "I CAN SET YOU UP FOR MORE CLICKS FOR LESS MONEY." YES MY CLICKS INCREASED AND SO DID MY CREDIT CARD CHARGES. CLICKS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. THEIR ANALYTICS AND CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT SITE REQUIRES A 2 YEAR DEGREE IN GOOGLE TO EVEN BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND IT. INDIA CUSTOMER SERVICE VERY VERY DIFFICULT TO EVEN FINISH A PHONE CALL WITHOUT GETTING DISCONNECTED... 1.5 HOURS ON THE PHOONE THE OTHER DAY AND BAMMMM... GONE. NO RETURN CALL OR EMAIL. IF THE GOVERNMENT THINKS FACEBOOK VIOLATES THE PUBLIC TRUST, CONSUMER AFFAIRS-FTC SHOULD TAKE A HARD LOOK AT GOOGLE AND THE MONOPOLY THEY ARE ABUSING.