Guilty By Association
As a fan of the Simpsons, if I were to head to the movies right now, I would see that, or perhaps Transformers, except that it might no longer play in one of the nicer cineplex theaters. Perhaps, I’d start with the Simpsons then sneak into a later showing of Transformers knowing that they only check ticket stubs for the new releases. I have snuck into exactly one movie in my life, and I did it at an age double that of the normal first timers. Sneaking into movies is fun, maybe even fair given the price of condiments, but a right of passage in the end. It’s also something else. Fraud. And, it’s one thing movies and Internet advertising have in common. If you run a movie theater, you will have people sneaking in to shows for which they didn’t pay. If you run an ad network or affiliate program of any kind, you will have people clicking on their own ads, filling out forms with bogus information, or much worse. So long as the fraud levels stay below a certain percent, the business doesn’t lose money, often making up such a small percentage that it doesn’t get noticed. If too much fraud occurs, the business will suffer, and it will take action. For a movie theater, this could mean more ticket checkers at other movies or changing the schedules. Online, it means banning certain affiliates or even pulling certain types of offers.
With respect to online, by and large, concerns of fraud or other dubious behavior happen on the publisher level. You don’t often hear about it on the advertiser level. Sure, some companies have a history of scrubbing funny to make their numbers look right, but again, when it comes to behaviors that lead to some form of reprimand, publishers just do it better and more frequently. Do a search for suspended by Google and you find a litany of publisher complaints, how-to’s, and even a lawsuit. Interestingly, despite the prevalence of made for adsense, and any other number of sites that fly counter to the spirit of Google, you don’t find anywhere near the number of instances of advertisers being banned. On one level that makes sense. While Google needs traffic, they only make money from advertisers. If they took a hard-line stance against advertisers, they could inadvertently wipe out too much revenue. Cleverly, instead of handing out loads of suspensions, Google simply charges people more. As a result, if you don’t have good quality traffic, that $.10 word for one will cost you $10.00.
It’s nice being Google. They get to make the rules and provide as little or as much information about them as possible. Even better, they can change the rules when they please. As it’s a marketplace, each change impacts the market, and if they make too big a change, the market could react negatively and significantly impact Google’s business. But with Google controlling so much of the market, they have decreased the elasticity, providing themselves a cushion that buffers them and provides them leeway when making changes. With this power, Google can make bigger changes and have it impact them less. It reminds me, in a way, of the diamond market. For reasons I can’t explain, I have bought into the whole diamond thing. I try not to like them, but I still do, and it doesn’t matter that logically I know DeBeers controls the market. If all of the diamonds actually came to market, they would have no value. As a result, DeBeers controls the market to insure that doesn’t happen. Google, in many ways, is the DeBeers of search. They are manipulative and an individual has almost no power. Which brings us to the advertiser suspensions. We mentioned that publishers of Google receive suspensions rather easily, but that Google deals with advertisers using price controls. Not necessarily.
Cutting a long story shorter, the lesson with Google and AdWords is cover your ass, be thorough, and really plan ahead. That’s often easier said than done, especially given how easy Google makes it to get going. You can argue that if you play by the rules, you have nothing to worry about, and that holds true in most cases. What you don’t want, though, is to experience what one of our friends recently did. They spent a solid five-figures monthly with Google – not huge but respectable. All of the sudden, they noticed their ads stopped serving. The account looked good – no errors, clean diagnostics, and as it turns out, this has happened to some advertisers randomly. It usually gets fixed in a few days. Being curious and falling prey to the ease of use, the advertiser decides to set up a new account. Don’t do that; information they learned after of course. On day five, they sent an email asking for insight. Then came the reply, "It has come to our attention that your Google AdWords account does not comply with our terms of service and advertising policies. You have repeatedly submitted ads that violated our policies in this or a related account. As a result, your account has been suspended and your ads will no longer run on Google." A follow-up asking for more information yielded, "This account has been suspended because it is related to account #14282xxx." A phone call only confirmed the email and ended with only confusion. Who was the other account? What made the two similar as it was a unique offer? Doesn’t matter. As judge, jury, and executioner, the sentence was laid down without appeal.
An advertiser can get a suspension for a variety of reasons. Unlike the English language as we know it, in Googlish a suspension does not imply a temporary state. Get a suspension, and you might as well have the black plague. Not only are you shunned, but you have the ability to infect others. And this is why we preach caution. Play it safe, especially when marketing direct response offers that might make Google money, but ask yourself whether you would feel good saying which offers you run to a die-hard Googler. If no, play it safe. And, yes ringtones falls into this category. To play it safe, don’t use your personal gmail as your AdWords login. If you work for a company and have a personal account, never log into both on the same machine without clearing your cookies and on a different IP. Google knows that it doesn’t take much to have multiple accounts, so they’ve gotten very good and diligent about looking to link accounts. Linking though is not bad; it really serves to prevent double listings, but as we see from the above, linking can happen when you least expect it, and it can sting. In the end, all one can do is enter that cat and mouse game with Google, which is a shame. And in the end that just hurts Google. It makes working them not a democracy but a dictatorship, and as unchallengeable rulings keep getting handed out, the more loose ends with which to contend. They spend too much time policing as opposed to working on the basic infrastructure. It’s a dangerous slope, and so long as they have their diamonds or their oil, the dictators can stay in power and make money. On the world stage, though, they lose.
