My problems started when I discovered that my Adwords campaign had been disabled by Google. Mind you I did not find this out because of an email they sent me, or that my adwords Campaign management page had any indication.

No– I discoverd this while noodling about exploring the gazillion tools Google provides for its advertisers. I discovered my ads were disabled by drilling down about eight levels, and then typing in a search phrase I would expect a local customer would type in. The tools said my ad would not get displayed, click here to find out why: and on clicking there, I found out the truth.

Luckily I have a local business which gets most new customers through word of mouth. The bad part is that because almost none of my new business arrives because of Google, I had not noticed my ads had been disabled for a month.

Well at least this hurts Google as much as me. If they don’t display my ads, they don’t get paid. Seems like bad business practice to me to not assist your customers.

Now it turns out that they had disabled my ad for two reasons: because they thought my web site was offline (it must have been unreachable when their robot came by the last time) AND I had violated some else’s trademark.

So here is where the story goes completely off the rails. I find the on-line customer service complaint form which explicitly says to be as descriptive and complete as possible to describe your problems.

Well I guess they didn’t really mean that complete, because I am wanting action/help on four different problems, but their online form limits number of characters typed! I’m only half-way through explaining problem two, its stops accepting input.

I think fine, and open a second customer issue, and type the second two.

I won’t go into the details, but I will say this, I never delete email. It goes in my trash and stays there. I use a Gmail account, so if the email got hung up at the provider end, google only has themselves to blame. So I am convinced they never sent a warning.

I still don’t know why my campaign management console did not display a warning, but the service rep dismissed my claim there too.

The ’stop order’ for my ad went away silently after a day or two.

The trademark issue block also went away, eventually, although Google never told me why or whose trademark they believed I was violating. Again, not a single email letting me know that they had resolved in my favor.

Reminds me of Jason Gambert for some odd reason.

Each of us have a learning curve and are not masters of the business when new to a particular process.

Dilip, I have no idea how you managed to miss the entire point of this post, but bottom line is that Google should not be hiring people who are not experts.

I want to see the damn ad for customer service reps that Google put out that actually says, “No experience required.”

And the truth is each and everyone person who sends that email can give most of the SEO guys in the real world a run for their money if they decide to have their own start ups. Lets just be happy that their knowledge is used to guide us, mind you, guide us to better advertising experience rather than killing us in our own field of work.

And its because of their employees with enviable ‘University’ backgrounds that we have such an amazing internet experience everyday.

Each of us have a learning curve and are not masters of the business when new to a particular process. I request you to refrain from revealing the identities of people.

As for the calibre of their staff, well I just choke with laughter at the thought of that. Google are so obsessed with which university their candidates attended and the grades they received that they fail to notice that these graduate recruits cannot understand or deal with people. Worse still, a great number of them evidently cannot even read their own emails!

Clearly a lot of Google’s bad points are rooted in the fact that its company policies and procedures are too idealistic – formulated by people who have probably never worked in a “real world” situation let alone run their own businesses. They think they are still at university and neither know nor care how their black and white ideas can affect people beyond their padded clusters.

Google is now ten so its definitely time for them to grow up and start showing their clients a little more respect.

I too find that they sometimes send pretty useless replies.

Often they simply cite a part of the online help. Usually that is exactly the part of the help that I did not understand and wanted to clarify.

It’s a trend several big companies have: instead of actually answering the precise question you asked, they send you an excerpt of their help files that is ’somewhat related’ to the topic of your question – but your actual question remains unanswered.