Google are currently experiencing issues with a ’small number’ of accounts receiving impressions and clicks on their content network while campaigns are paused. This is a known issue which seems to be effecting their content network only.
Google engineers are working on a resolution, but as you would expect, any click cost accrued when campaigns are paused will be refunded to advertisers. Just get in touch with your account manager or contact Adwords support.
This is a complaint about Google Adwords. I signed up for an Adwords account and began making payments via my credit card. The results of these advertisements were very poor — although I was paying 100 - 200 per month for the ads. During the first 3 months, I got very few results, and decided to cancel my account which started on September 10, 2006.
The first week I was charged $101 for the adwords advertising. This wasn’t so bad I thought — let it run and see if I get any results.
The second week I was charged $57, $97, $53, $72, then …. $214. I started getting worried … the next day it was $390. I paniced and contacted Google suggesting that perhaps a competitor was running up my account on purpose. I opened an investigation on malicious clicks and paused my account (I thought). Of course, this took several days, so by the time I heard from the results, I had been charged: $528, then $566. They said that they could find no evidence of malicious clicks. I told them that I was getting no results — only about two leads so far. I was doing better through Yahoo at 1/10th the price.
I immediately logged into Google and stopped my account. I cancelled the account on 10/18. After cancelling, I continued to get charges. I was OK with the first charge after cancellation since I figured there might be some lag — $553. However, then I got an additional charge of $415 posted to my credit card on 11/11 — about 3 weeks after I had cancelled the account, I lodged a protest.
Google claims that these charges were legitimate — resulting from “… accrued charges for legitimate advertising activity
between October 12th and October 18th while your campaign was active.” and that this was agreed to in my original agreement for Adwords.
I still believe one of my competitors was maliciously clicking to drive me off of advertising, but, of course, I can’t prove that. However, I do not feel that I should have to pay the remaining $415 and protested this amount on my credit card.
Now Google is threatening to turn my account over to collection. What recourse do I have — Google is Google and therefore they are right?
My company is a very small one-person company. I cannot afford big legal fees to fight this. What can I do?
spelhank
adwords ex-user
January 13th, 2007