Today I would like to abuse my position as a State of Search blogger to start a discussion about a new feature Google announced back in September which in my opinion can really hurt an honest advertiser. I’m talking about an e-mail all AdWords advertisers received from Google, saying that they also start actively reviewing paused ads.
In some cases, this can really hurt an advertiser, even though he might be doing everything right. It hit one of my clients last week and after a short and useless discussion with Google support I decided to blog about it. Maybe it will help.
The case
So here is the case: my client runs a lot of European websites and we are managing all their Adwords accounts. Unfortunately the IT department of the client made a mistake and broke one of the websites. This can happen, it happens to all of us sometimes, right?
We have a monitoring system on the websites, so our system pauses the ad groups almost immediately. Unfortunately this happened on an early Saturday morning so it took a couple of days to fix the problem and get the site back online. In the meantime Google starts checking and disapproving all ads, even though campaigns are paused. That’s okay, they told us, that they will do this. I think it’s not necessary, but they can decide to do so. I’m fine with that.
But now the website is back online, but the ads (that ran perfectly for a longer period) are all disapproved. This is where I come to the crux of this post: Unfortunately Google doesn’t offer a way to submit an ad for review.
As you can read here the only way is “editing and saving” the ad. But why should I edit an ad that works perfectly, that is pointing to a landing page which is perfectly working? Why should I insert a space or some punctuation I don’t need, just to resubmit my ad for review, losing the history and statistics? Why doesn’t Google offer me a possibility to ask for a new review in this case?
The client gets punished by Google, not because he tried to run ads on a broken website, but because his website wasn’t working and he paused the campaigns! What should an Adwords client do in this case? Google’s answer: “AdWords-Ads should be connected to working websites“.
Who is wrong here?
Probably there are other cases in which this rule really can be hurting an advertiser, even though the advertiser is behaving correctly. I’m not sure why Google also started reviewing paused ads. Probably they do it to filter out bad advertiser that have old campaigns and ads that violated their guidelines. Maybe they want to catch evil affiliates…. I don’t know.
The official Google statement here is:
“to eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved and to ultimately enhance your experience with Google AdWords“.
What I do know is, that this feature change can hurt an advertiser, who is trying the best he can to play by the rules! Google, please give us the possibility to submit an ad for review without changing anything (when the landing page is back online of course)!
