We have just been through a week of communications with ‘Hannah’ in Google’s Adwords support department. This all started with a terse email from The Adwords Police (TAP) which read …
“Hello,
We wanted to alert you that one of your sites violates our advertising policies. Therefore, we won’t be able to run any of your ads that link to that site, and any new ads pointing to that site will also be disapproved.
Here’s what you can do to fix your site and hopefully get your ad running again:
Make the necessary changes to your site that currently violates our policies:
Display URL: cad4u.co.uk
Policy violation: Software principles
Details & instructions: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/50423?hl=en_gb“
In the immortal words of the late Derek Jameson … do they mean us?
Well we were stunned that Google even cared, but I suppose they now have increasing pressure from the regulatory authorities to clean up their seedier Adwords subscribers … but did they REALLY mean us?
Clicking the link above I’m afraid left us none the wiser, and so an email to Adwords support brought about the communications with ‘Hannah’ … I use the inverted commas because I’m not sure if ‘Hannah’ is cyborg or human. Nevertheless the bottom line on ‘Hannah’s’ response was …
“Hi Ian,
Thanks for your email.
I’m sorry that your Ads have not been approved.I’ve looked at your website http://cad4u.uk/ and found that it is not in compliance with our Abuse of the Ad Network – Malicious Content – Unwanted Software policy. Per policy, We want ads to be useful, varied, relevant and safe for users when serving them across the Google Network.
Examples:
Failure to be transparent about the functionality that the software provides or the full implications of installing the software, failing to include Terms of Service or an End User License Agreement, bundling software or applications without the user’s knowledge, making system changes without the user’s consent, making it difficult for users to disable or uninstall the software, failing to properly use publicly available Google APIs when interacting with Google services or products.I’d like to bring the following points to your attention:
• Terms of Service or an End User License Agreement not included
• No instructions on how to disable or uninstall the softwareI would request you to make these changes to your website and reply to this email and I will be happy to assist you further.
Regards,
Hannah”
Right-e-ho … we now comprendo … so we added some words to the download page – see Google please note:. Having completed this task we informed ‘Hannah’ of our eagerness to oblige, to which ‘Hannah’ duly replied …
“Hi Ian,
Thank you for making these additions to your website.
I will refer the Ads to a specialist for review and will reply to this email as soon as I hear back from them.
Thanks for your patience.
Regards,
Hannah”
One and a half hours later … to the minute … we received from TAP the following confirmation we had been waiting for … hallelujah!
“Great news! We’ve re-reviewed your site and determined that the following site complies with our Advertising Policies: Display URL: cad4u.co.uk”
As yet we have not re-submitted the ads for TAP approval, so they are currently not running … and what was the ad that all the fuss was about I hear you ask (not) ?
… well see caption right:
We were running the ad in all the English speaking countries worldwide but decided not to get them running again. This is because our research, prompted by the whole sorry tale above, has shown that the search term ‘RoboCAD’ has the cad4u.co.uk site coming up 3rd in the generic Google. search results, and 4th in Bing, with the post we made Calling all RoboCAD users some time ago … RESULT!