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I'm in Adwords hell
At some point in the last few months, Google Adwords decided to ding one of my Adwords campaign. The campaign is for my Tortola travel guide site.
The ads used to do very well in Adwords - 4% clickthrus. And I built each individual ad in the campaign to go to the proper page on my site, I followed all the Google guidelines. I tweaked and tweaked the ads and overtime they did really well - Tortola was doing a couple hundred people a day via both organic search and Adwords.
But suddenly Google stopped showing my ads. I don't know why.
The reason Google gives is that the ads are "rarely shown due to low quality score". A trip through the Adwords Diagnostic Tool tells me that "Your keyword isn't triggering ads to appear because your bid is likely below the first page bid estimate. " I used to pay $.07 per click, so I upped the max CPC to $1/click and nothing changed -- still "rarely shown due to low quality score."
What happened? I have no clue. I changed domains over the summer - I purchased Tortola.net from Sedo. That could be it - however I followed all the Google webmaster guidelines and my rankings haven't changed that much.
I had a similar problem with a campaign for my Martha's Vineyard guide last summer - the ads wouldn't initally show. So went through the Adwords help process (dig through the site for the email form, then wait and pray for someone to help). Eventually, I convinced a woman to make my ads show. And they did wonderfully during the summer.
So I tried the same process over the last few weeks. This time I cannot get anyone at Google to respond. I even emailed Larry Page - nothing.
It's really getting me angry. Google can just decide not to show ads for some reason. I can understand that. But give us some better support so we can fix the issue. Everyone complains about Adwords & Adsense customer support - but Google has never done a thing.
The biggest problem is that there's no competition. Yahoo and Microsoft can't compare to Google search and Adwords. But with that market leadership, the company that "does no evil" needs to step up support.
What can I do? Is the Justice Department is the answer?
