A self-serving fantasy
Over on the official AdSense Help Forums, there's a recurring conversation that goes something like this:
"AdSense is totally unsupported. You can't call them by phone. When you e-mail them, you just get a form letter back. They don't tell you anything, they don't help you, and then they take your account away (or refuse to give you one in the first place)! Google is horrible, all they do is meet presidential candiates and fly fighter jets and make stupid phones, and they've totally given up on us poor AdSense publishers!"
This, in a word, is hogwash.
AdSense is a well-supported system with a standing army of helpful, informative, and intelligent staff who work very hard not only to ensure that publishers make money, but that advertisers are protected from fraud and being associated with 'bad neighborhoods,' i.e. porn, hack, warez, and similar content.
The reason people feel the program is unsupported is that it is actually supported very efficiently. Instead of paying their people millions of dollars per year to answer phone calls and e-mails that are, 99% of the time, just the same half-dozen questions, they have a comprehensive and very robust system of FAQs, community forums, and 'how-to' documents that explain nearly anything you might need to ask about the AdSense system. By doing this, Google saves millions of dollars each year that would ultimately be wasted...and that savings is reflected not in lower ad prices (because that is a function of supply and demand, and Google is merely a conduit), but in the percentage of those prices that flows back to the publishers.
The Reality
The simple fact is, AdSense is very well-supported and you can easily find an answer to just about any question you have. Here's a great example of what I'm talking about - a legitmate list of the first page from one of the help forums this week:
Now the above message is 'pinned' to the top of the forum. For anyone to even post a message, they have to load the page that has the above message right at the top of the page. It's literally the first thing you see when you load the page up.
And what follows it?
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problem showing exchange rate .. |
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My customer id is 8390271145. The payment has been issued on Oct 23. I am from India. But the exchange rate is being shown as 1.000 : 1. Can u pls look into it ? I guess many others have complained about the same problem. Thanks. - Debasish
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Wrong exchange rate |
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Today when i saw my payment details,i am shocked with the exchange rate (1:1).please any body help me. love u google.
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And there are dozens more like this in the forum, nearly all of which are dated after the pinned message from the AdSense Pro. I don't mean to suggest that using the forums is a bad thing - as you can see in the post summary from AdSense Pro Jennifer, sometimes the forum is where Google gets their first indication of a problem.
What I do mean to suggest is that far too often, people just don't bother taking the most basic steps to leverage the power and information in the existing AdSense help system. There are tutorials and FAQs and clearly stated policies all over the place...and people just don't use them. Then they get an attitude with Google and claim there's "no support." I could only wish that all my vendors had the kind of comprehensive, easy to use support system that Google has.
The Publisher's Responsibility
The only thing Google asks is that their publishers actually take the time to read and understand the program policies, webmaster guidelines, and terms of use. For some reason, people seem to be utterly incapable of understanding that being an AdSense Publisher is a business. You are a business partner who has entered in to a contract with Google. One would suppose that, when entering in to a contract, the interested parties would actually read what they're signing...but iinvariably, every week, there are dozens of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other self-described 'professionals' who come to the AdSense Help Forum and admit - whether they realize it or not - that this is exactly what they've done.
It's awfully hard for thoseof us who work diligently at developing content for our sites to take people seriously when they are obviously not taking themselves very seriously. It's certainly not Google's responsibility to compensate for that lack by spending millions on redundant service features that exist solely to hold the hands of people who don't care enough about their business to simply read the directions, but care deeply enough about it to raise all manner of Cain when they think they're not getting paid.
What You Can Expect From AdSense Support
If you e-mail AdSense support, almost invariably they will send a form response. The same goes if they find your site in violation of their program policies.
This is not because they don't care, they're ripping you off, they don't want to communicate, or AdSense is unstaffed/understaffed. It's because in almost every situation, the answers you seek, or the details of how you have violated the program policies, are contained in the information they send you.
You might get an e-mail from Google saying "we've found that your page at [address] poses a risk to our advertisers. [Insert a couple of paragraphs with links, describing the policies they feel you are violating.]" Or you might e-mail them with a question, and they'll respond with "Please see [some articles] in our help system."
This is the point where a lot of people just get frustrated, exclaim "GOOGLE HAS TERRIBLE SUPPORT" and give up. Unfortunately, this is also where your answers are. If you ask Google a question and they send you a link, that means that they think the link contains the answer you're looking for. If you think it doesn't, the first thing to do is not post an angry message to the AdSense help forum. The first thing to do is look again, because chances are very good that you simply either didn't understand the answer, or don't think it applies to you.
The same goes for violation notices. Here's how it works:
Someone posts adsense on...oh, let's say a blog full of photographs they copied from other sites.
Google sends them a note saying "we notice that your site is in violation of our policies, for example on page http://foo." Then they paste in the relevant sections of the program policy they feel is being violated.
THIS IS ENOUGH INFORMATION TO CORRECT THE PROBLEM.
Unfortunately, what USUALLY happens is, instead of the publisher going "Oh, yeah, I guess I should nuke that content (or whatever)," they think to themselves something like:
- "Well, I saw other sites with adsense that did this"
- "I'm not HOSTING the illegal content, I'm just LINKING to it"
- "I have every right to build a site about why it's justifiable to kill green people with plaid hair who speak a hybrid of Esperanto and medieval Norse, and YOU CAN'T STOP ME."
- "That photograph of my sister engaged in activities best not discussed in polite company with fifteen midgets, a garden rake, two marmosets, and a five-gallon bucket of fudge ripple is ART, not PORN."
- "It's a violation of my FREE SPEACH RIGHTS for them to tell me I can't talk about (insert subject here)"
- "[blank stare]"
Then they do nothing, and a few days later their ads disappear and they show up in the Help forums going "OMG GOGGLE STOLED MY MONEY THEY SHUT MY ACCOUNT OFF WITH NO WARNING!!!1!11!!1"
The e-mail that Google sent WAS your 'warning,' and frankly it's more warning than you deserve. The progarm policies are clear, and you are required to read and agree to them before you get an AdSense account. If you chose not to do so, then that is nobody's fault but your own. Google is actually doing you a favor by notifying you at all or giving you a chance to make corrections - they have every right, according to the contract you signed, to nuke your account at any time, for any reason, without explanation. The fact that they've even bothered to notify you that there's a problem is more than they are obligated to do...and in many cases it's more than you deserve. If you don't care enough about what you're doing to bother reading some simple instructions, then why should Google take money out of the pockets of other publishers who DID do their homework, just to hold your hand? Don't sit there arguing. Stop lying to yourself and to Google. You know exactly what the problem is - you just thought you'd get away with it.
If you honestly don't see the problem, then post the e-mail and a link to your website to the Help forums, and other publishers will be happy to take a look and maybe see what you don't. Sometimes, you can even get a consensus agreement that Google is in error - it doesn't happen often, but it's happened once or twice - but if you just show up and scream, act like a jerk, and don't provide any information for people to look at, then nobody can help you and nobody will really want to. After all, who wants to help a jerk?
But most importantly, don't waste your time, or anyone else's, laboring under the delusion that you can get away with scamming the system.
You won't.
What You Can't Expect From AdSense Support
Much like Google's search algorithms, there are some aspects of the AdSense system that are confidential, proprietary, and not shared with you or anyone else. There is good reason for this - too much information in the public domain could result in other companies figuring out Google's contextualization algorithms, for instance, or answering certain questions might result in les sscrupulous individuals finding ways to 'game' the system. So if you ask "Can you tell me exactly how you parse my web page to give weight to certain words for generating matching ads' or 'can you tell me the most expensive keywords in the AdWords program," you're not going to get an answer - that information would just lead to people creating junk web pages that trigger high-yield keyword ad service, which devalues the system for advertisers and consequently for publishers.
Keep in mind, however: If Google is not willing to part with the information you're seeking, then you're not likely to get ANY response from them. If they answer you - especially if that answer includes links - then the information they've provided will answer your question, if you take advantage of it.
The Reasons
I mentioned efficiency before. The simple fact is, maintaining 24-7 phone support and typing e-mail responses that are just reiterations of the same information you should have already read in the first place is a waste of money...and that money is coming out of the pockets of advertisers and publishers who really aren't interested in paying for other people's laziness or willful ignorance. As an added bonus, this kind of intransigence helps weed out the slack, lazy, ignorant, and dishonest publishers who bring the whole system down and make the whole thing look shady anyway.
The Conclusion
Google's AdSense program is well-supported, meticulously documented, and pretty easy to understand, if you bother taking the time to do so. If you don't, then chances are you won't last long in the AdSense program anyway, and making a big stink about it on the forums (or anywhere else) is a waste of time. You're not going to sue anyone and win; you're not going to destroy the AdWords system; you're not going to have anyone's job. You'll just be left out in the cold, stuck with lower-quality ad programs, wishing you could get back into a quality system like AdSense.
If you don't want to be weeded out, then don't act like a weed. If you want to be treated and respected like a professional and partner, act like one.
