Account Under Review - You Could Have Said!

ACCOUNT UNDER REVIEW - YOU COULD HAVE SAID!

Zoe Piper 21st July 2008

I recently set up an Adwords campaign and ran into my first problem - the adverts didn't show! If Google wanted to they could have told me the problem in seconds, but it seems that Adwords customer service is pretty much non-existent.

The Adwords account was for a client, so obviously quite important. It took a day to set up and I was confident of getting it finished on time. Only when I checked Google search to see the adverts I saw...nothing! Uh-oh!

I checked the whole account and the only error message I could find was one telling me I'd exceeded my daily budget. Only, the adverts hadn't even shown! I searched the internet for clues and came up stumped, and emailing support through the Adwords account didn't get me a reply. It was half 4 on a Friday so not a lot to be done, just go home brooding on what I must have done wrong.

On Monday morning nothing had changed, so Paul - equally stumped - got in touch with our rep at Google. It turns out the account is simply 'under review' and should be up and running tomorrow.

I've never encountered this review process before - every campaign I've ever set up has been running from day one no problem. What bothers me is that I wasn't informed - we had to contact Google to find out and it's only because we have a rep that we got an answer at all. A simple message in the Adwords account would have made the situation clear straight away.

Today's Moral

Adwords isn't always great, especially when there's a problem. Having a rep at Google to sort things out is priceless!

Notes and Queries...

I cannot tell you how frustrating it is. I've had accounts working fine, I'll make one change and it flags a review straight away.

They don't tell you of course, they just give the excuse: 'you have reached and exceeded your budget' which is definitely not the case!

I don't have a Google rep so it's the waiting game for me :(

Mark 13th August 2008

Thanks for your article.. Seems like a lot of people are having the same problem. Such a simple answer, but very hard to find any information on it for some reason.

Michael 19th August 2008

Yes this is by far VERY frustrating! I have run into the issue myself personally. I have an adwords account running no problem. I built a website for a client and setup an adwords account for them, the adsrun for about an hour then get shutdown for "exceeded daily budget" I immediately contacted google. 4 days pass and still no ads running! It's sooooo frustrating.

Jason Miller 21st September 2008

I just had the same issue on an account I was helping someone with. We broke out some keywords into separate campaigns to make the ads more relevant and the whole account died. We contacted Google and they apologized and said the account was under review. Seems like they could post an alert to the account to let the customer know the status. However, they did respond very quickly to our e-mail.

Wayne C. 29th September 2008

Same issue here - ad words support is absolutely horrible. Second time I've had this problem in two months. First time I ditched the old account and created a new one, which worked. This time it didn't. I'm stalled with no options and as Google is my primary ad medium, I'm losing thousands daily. Sent emails to no avail and now I'm two days in. Please help! At the rate Google is printing money, seems like they could create a financial case for better support, when you consider the revenue their losing to less clicks. Highly annoying.

Darin J 2nd October 2008

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