I’m an incredibly active user of AdWords, having spent more than $50,000 through various business accounts over the past few years. In 2009 I created a “personal” AdWords account to test out some new features in a “sandbox” environment, but never intended to run active campaigns there. In January 2010 I created a test campaign with 2 or 3 keywords but never activated it, and in fact I took what steps I believed were necessary to “deactivate” this account. The keywords were never “approved” by Google anyway & so I didn’t give this account a second thought after this point, since I was busy managing my *very* active business accounts.
Over 1 year later, Google randomly “approved” these keywords & began running ads without alerting me, eventually running up a tab of about $75 during June & July of 2011. When I first noticed these charges on my bank statement (billed as “cc@google.com” with no other identifying information) I was totally confused & contacted Google’s “fraud protection” department with the info. They said they could not identify the charges and advised me to begin a chargeback procedure with my bank. Later, when I remembered having set up the test AdWords account I checked it out and confirmed that this was the source of the charges.
I contacted AdWords support about getting a refund on these charges via both their email & phone support lines and in both cases was told that a refund was impossible. In both cases the reps that I spoke with acknowledged that the extreme delay (1+ YEAR) in “approving” the keywords was “unusual” but ultimately this was my problem for not monitoring my account more closely and a lack of understanding about the AdWords product on my part. As I mentioned I am a heavy user of AdWords and have never had any similar problems with my business accounts, and I also consider myself a relatively sophisticated user of the service.
I feel personally insulted by the suggestion that I simply “didn’t understand” the administration of my AdWords account and I am mystified by Google’s apparent lack of concern about the satisfaction of an otherwise happy and *heavy* user of their service. I know their corporate motto is “Don’t be evil” and while this incident may not directly contradict that statement, I also believe that there is an implicit counterpart of “Don’t be a dick” which it most certainly does.
As all the hoopla surrounding AirBNB’s handling of their own customer service issues in the past few weeks has shown, the tone & sincerity of a company’s response to any given situation is often of equal or greater importance to the content of the response itself, and I believe that this is a lesson that Google must take to heart if they really do want to maintain their hard-earned reputation for doing the right thing. This is more important now than ever as Google attempts to crack the code of “Social” product design which has previously eluded their analytical, data-centric corporate culture, but since well over 90% of their total revenue continues to come from traditional forms of online advertising (search & remnant display) I’m increasingly pessimistic that they’ll be able to pull it off.
Anyway, maybe I’m just unnecessarily upset over this, but $75 isn’t pocket change and I really do think it speaks to a much larger issue (lack of attention to customer service & satisfaction) that lurks at the heart of many of Google’s recent problems. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go place some more ads on Project Wonderful and Reddit, where I’ve never had a issue that wasn’t handled quickly, efficiently and to my complete satisfaction. =D
