Client wants to sue Google for AdWords fraud

[sergiuliano]

Good Topic!

The thing is that you'll be amazed to see how many AdWords campaigns are wrong configurated either by the website owner or by a third party.

Take a look to the next HeatMap analysis on Advertisers for the keywords "Dentist"

For example: tarpondentalhealth dot com is running AdWords campaign on

Huston
Indianapolis
Los Angeles
Manhattan
NY City
San Francisco
San Jose

But they have local presence only in Florida.

There are at least 2 mistakes in those campaigns:

1 - I would use long tail keywords in order to increase conversions
2 - the targeted locations seems to be missconfigured

This is a good way of throwing money on the window and saying that AdWords brings no results.

Most of the websites listed in the colored cells from the heatmap seems to have their campaigns miss-configured, so the conclusion is that max 20-30% of the campaigns are configured correctly .

Lot of prospects for AdWords Managers

 

[Chris Ratchford]

Good news folks!

I spoke with a representative at Google and they've credited the client for the full amount of clicks incurred (over $4500)!

Not a refund, but the client is very happy that we were able to get this resolved. He feels like he's been heard and believes it's a fair outcome.

 

[Scott Rawlins]

Wait a minute.....Google actually admitted that they were wrong?!

I'm sure you and he both knew that a refund probably wasn't going to happen, but I'm sure he can put that $4,500 credit to good use.

Glad you were able to get it worked out and make your client happy.

Kudos to you Chris!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yay Chris!

So that's great news. He probably ended up getting at least a few free local clicks out of that deal and it's the least they could do, since the rep mishandled the account.

Good to hear!

 

[johncrenshaw]

I'm 90% certain I've seen 3rd party Adwords reps that were like trusted partners or outsourced or something that did not work for Google but had Google email addresses.

Fairly certain this was/is happening as well. A while back we had a "Google rep" call to review an account - don't usually do that b/c we usually know more about adwords than they do - but for whatever reason I bit.

This person had an @google.com email address but needed us to add them as a user on the account. This person also seemed to me to be pushing a bit too hard to increase spend on an account in ways that didn't really make sense.

That seemed odd to me and I eventually determined this was some sort of 3rd party that Google must have authorized to use that email domain.

It was all a bit schemy.