I've just been wrangling with Google Adwords about some campaigns that I
manage which had been taken offline 'credit card could not be billed'.

After DAYS of emailling and phoning, I finally discovered that the three
campaigns had all been taken offline because a while ago I did an
Adwords review for someone who later failed to pay their adwords bill.
Their adwords bill, not mine, note. My name was not on the account, and
I made no changes to it apart from tweaking some keywords and logging in
to do some checkups over a period of a couple of weeks.

The Adwords system had seen I'd checked their account from the same IP
address that was later used to manage one of my other accounts, so when
it identified this guy as a bad debt, it took ALL my accounts offline,
even though each of them is paid using a separate credit card, two of
them are moderately high spenders, and all have been running and paying
regularly as good Adwords customers for more than a year.

Given that I am on ISDN and don't HAVE a fixed IP, this is particularly
crazy! As it happened, the confusion was with an account belonging to
someone I'd spoken to, but I can't see any technical reason why my
accounts couldn't have got tied to someone else who just happened to be
using the same ISP whose IP I happened to pick up.

Anyway, if you do any Adwords work on more than one account, beware!
Even logging in once to get data for a keyword research report could be
enough to link other accounts you work on to that account permanently.

In theory, someone should have contacted me from Adwords, but in
practice this didn't happen and the accounts were offline for 6 days by
the time I'd worked out that the problem wasn't with any of the credit
cards, reported it as a technical fault, had it ignored, phoned them,
phoned them again....

(before anyone posts their 'Adwords is crap why don't you just
optimise' rant, I should leap in and explain that these sites use
complex CMSes, tied to their print material, their sales department,
their customer relationship management software, etc etc. Although some
optimisation work has been possible, it is actually cheaper for them to
pay out for ads for some things than it would be to rengineer their
systems and site to get search traffic to them.

Adwords is also handy to get results for terms that you might not want
to emphasise on the site, because they don't have the right brand feel,
or because they are synonyms or whatever.)

Victoria
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Clare Associates Ltd
http://www.clareassoc.co.uk/
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