We’ve run campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords from day 1. Actually, we ran ads before the site was even on the print-bingo.com domain. So, it’s been years.
We learned this week that Google has quality checks to make sure that AdWords customers are running legitimate websites. I.e. they don’t want to sell advertising to scammers, malware installers, virus tricksters, and whatever Google deems to be low quality sites. As with all things Google, these are highly automated processes. This quality score concept makes sense – I would be less likely to click on ads if there was a chance that the landing page was virus laden.
Apparently, after our large edits to print-bingo.com in August, we tripped the quality scanner and our AdWords campaigns were turned off. We sent a support request in to Google and a few days later, after a manual review, our ads are now running again. Yay! More advertising expenses. :)
The strangest thing is that we didn’t even notice for two weeks. We’re happy to say that sales are up so much year over year, that we just didn’t notice. It did seem weird that we weren’t getting many (in retrospect, zero) referrals from Google AdWords that lead to conversions, but that happens some days, so it didn’t shout problem.
What’s the point of this post? Well, actually, I think we’re bragging about our increased sales. But on a practical note, make sure you watch your campaigns – I couldn’t find a way to get email notifications, but it might be buried in the interface somewhere. You can always watch your logs. Anyway, the point is, even if things are going well, it’s possible that they could still go better.
Technical notes: If you want to see when you’ve been visited by the quality bot? Check your web access logs for the user agent AdsBot-Google.