Vancouver Website Design Firm Contacts Google AdWords to Resolve Problem
Posted by: Jose Uzcategui on 7/27/2010 7:20:39 PM
Did you know you can contact Google for help correcting a variety of issues? If you have a valid argument, you can deal with a human at Google and get action to be taken. Here's a recent case for us.
A few weeks ago, just a couple of months after our new site launched, we decided to run a Google Adwords campaign. Right away we noticed all our keywords had a Quality Score of 1/10. A poor quality score basically means that Google doesn't see relevancy between your keywords, ads, and landing page. Accordingly, your cost-per-click (CPC) is raised and your keywords don't show as often.
(The better Quality Score, the cheaper your clicks and the higher the position of the ad.)
When keywords have a low Quality Score, Google Adwords hints about the reason why that is. In our case Adwords was telling us the reason for our poor keyword Quality Score was our landing page: Landing Page Quality: Poor - The Horror!!!
Did we have a poor quality landing page? We didn’t think so. Google is pretty straightforward when it comes to quality landing page guidelines and we were complying.
Your content should be:
- Relevant and original
- Transparent and easy to understand what the offer and value proposition is.
- Have good navigability and allow the user to access more information within a few clicks.
We complied with all their requirements and couldn't understand why Google would assign a poor Quality Score to our keywords.
Even after search on Google's Adwords Help Forum, we didn't find any similar cases and in fact, reassured us that there was something wrong with Google, not us.
I decided to contact Google through their contact form. Later that day we got our first reply.
Here are the replies from the Google Adwords team:
We basically had two interactions with the Google Adwords team. Both replies were quite fast - I was impressed.
After the first email we received this reply:
Hi Jose,
Thank you for your email. I understand you would like to request a
re-review of your website snaptech.com. I have reached out to our
specialists and submitted your request for a review. I will contact you
again once I hear back from our specialist team. In the meantime, however,
please feel free to review our landing page and site quality guidelines,
located here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=28440&guide=28439&page=guide.cs.
I understand that you would like a re-review of both the website
snaptech.com and the page snaptech.com/[ourlandingpage]. Please note
that landing page quality applies to any page within a given site.
Therefore, it is only necessary for our specialists to re-review
snaptech.com in order for all of the pages on that website to also receive
a review. This is why I previously mentioned that I had requested a
re-review only of snaptech.com.
Thank you for your patience and please feel free to reply directly to this
email with any additional concerns you may have regarding this issue.
Sincerely,
Ann O.
The Google AdWords Team
In order to get this reply I was very detailed with my problem and, most importantly, I included the Google help files that related to my problem.
Two days later we got the good news:
Hi Jose,
I'm writing on behalf of my colleague, Ann O., to let you know that the
review process of your site is now complete. We appreciate your patience
and are happy to inform you that your website was not correctly evaluated
by our system, and we've fixed this error. You should see improvements to
your Quality Score soon, reflected by higher Quality Score details for
your keywords.
Keep in mind that we're constantly improving the way the AdWords system
evaluates landing page quality, and there's no guarantee that your Quality
Score won't be affected by a poor landing page quality in the future. To
prevent this from happening, we recommend ensuring that your site complies
with our landing page quality guidelines, found at
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46675&hl=en_US.
If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you'll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.
Sincerely,
Katherine G.
The Google AdWords Team
Soon after receiving this email we checked our keyword scores and indeed they had changed.
Here are some things to have in mind when contacting Google:
1. Always check the Help Forums. Check them thoroughly because chances are they're probably going to redirect you to one them.
2. Know your argument or question well. If you contact Google with a general question, they'll provide you with a general answer - if at all. Before you contact them check the guidelines and make sure you have an argument or an unanswered question for them. Non-sense questions also delay replies to other important questions for the rest of us.
3. Include the Google help files you've reviewed in the message. The Google team is under instructions, it seems, to first direct you to the help files on their site. If you can provide them with the links to those files and explain how they have not been helpful, you'll be ahead of the game.
4. Be Polite. An actual person will be reading the message. Being polite, patient and understanding will make them respond faster.
The point is, Google provides a service and they actually have customer support. So don't think it's impossible to contact Google if you think something is off and you know they reason.
We've successfully resolved various problems with Google Adwords and Google Analytics, which are the two Google tools we use the most.
We would like to hear your stories trying to contact Google.
