Google just shut down our $1M business
I’ve been browsing HN for a decade now and somewhere I read on HN that people lose their online account and everything associated with their account. This has stuck with me and at one point I thought to create a second Google ads account to make sure our main Google ads account was able to keep running if the other account somehow received a violation. Just a pure spread-your-risks decision. After we decided to move into Germany with our eco-friendly brand, I used the second Google ads account to create German ads on a new Shopify hosted .de domain. The ads would target by geo location, consumers in Germany, so that there would be no overlap with our main market.
After a couple hours our account and our Merchant Center account, which is used for shopping ads, got suspended. I had no clue why so I wasted an appeal. After further reading on the internet, I discovered that creating more than one Google ads account is against Google policy. This is how scammers work to dominate search and shopping results. Never knew that. I was told that Google doesn’t consider intention, so you’re either good or bad. In this case I was the biggest criminal according to Google and my account was banned on a personal level for life. Not allowed to advertise ever again on Google. Lost some good nights sleep over that one.
The first ad account remained working which I find bizarre as the payment information and addresses used on these 2 accounts were exactly the same as I did not have bad intentions.
About a month ago I was invited to join the accelerated growth program of Google to help businesses expand into other countries. I was working with 2 Google account managers 4 weeks to prepare launching -again- in Germany. I used our .com domain to target Germany. All was well until I accidentally added .de for an ad instead of .com/de/, within an hour our main account was suspended. After an appeal and having it bumped to priority from my Google account manager, I received the depressing email that our account remains suspended. And that we should not create new Google ads accounts as those will be suspended too. Great.
We are all perplexed how a legit company, selling eco friendly products that we design ourselves, have it all trademarked, and have in stock in our own warehouse, are treated like criminals.
Luckily we massively increased our ad spend on social media couple weeks ago and are well positioned in Amazon, but I have really lost all faith in Google and their policy teams. We will (barely) survive as search and shopping was a big chunk of our revenue.
That you get flagged by a bot, gets suspended, I can get into that. But if you explain your story, have advertised for over 3 years with $30k monthly ad spent (I know it’s tiny for some, but for us as a small business it’s big), and all domains sell the same products, just into another country, than get your account banned for life, is just ridiculous.
Just had to get this off my shoulders and possibly warn anyone ever thinking doing the same to spread your company’s risks. A real butterfly effect, what an impact a single post or comment eventually had on my business down the line.
87 comments
[ 1656 ms ] story [ 2867 ms ] thread* This proves ChatGPT has no world model. If it had one, it would have been aware that undoing a Google suspension is impossible, therefore no account can be suspended twice. /j
It missing the ironic point isn't that big of a deal in a summary tbh, I wouldn't have included that either. Your other point stands though, that's an important detail to get right ä.
I think it's because people are leery of threads being taken over by GPT produced comments. But so long as the requests/GPT comments/ are clearly marked, not too many, and with some justification for the request, I don't mind.
https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/dont-believe-chatgpt
ChatGPT is a convincing fiction generator. Any facts it produces are purely coincidental.
It's just really good at mansplaining and gaslighting people about things it knows nothing about.
ChatGPT is meant to mimic a human. Not be some god like arbtrar of truth. No such entity will ever exist.
I asked it recently about how Fermat's Last Theorem was discussed in Star Trek (referencing the episode where Picard is talking to Riker about how it's never been solved, though in reality it was solved less than 10 years after the episode aired), and it wrote a very convincing answer that was complete BS, making up details in different episodes that didn't actually happen. It's easy to get detailed plot summaries of these episodes from Wikipedia or Memory Alpha, so I'm really curious how ChatGPT got its info, or if it just likes to make things up that sound plausible but are completely wrong. Just for starters, according to ChatGPT, Picard did not talk about Fermat's theorem; Data did!
That's what I was trying to understand. ChatGPT doesn't have a gender, nor is it aware of the gender of the person talking to it, unless explicitly told. Wouldn't that preclude it from mansplaining?
That a single company, in an unrelated market (ads), merely refusing to do business with you, can almost bankrupt you, means it's time for trust-busting. No single company should have such power.
OP did put eggs in different basquet ( social medias ) but Google will be Google right? What would be the alternative.
That's the point, there is not alternative at the moment. Breaking up monopolies allows competition and an alternative provider when something like this happens.
Not something needed in a functioning market but if a company decides and manages to dominate a certain market, the rules change one way or another.
PS: I'm deliberately avoiding the word "monopoly". It's not required in most jurisdictions.
But I think it is outrageous how they mistreat important customers like OP and let some petty employee who probably has never done anything useful in their life destroy the livelihood of other people just out of spite.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/04/google-in...
Ya that’s good for competition right? Regulatory capture?
Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online and their deliberate, persistent efforts to maintain a faceless veneer, through which meaning for customer support, for those businesses is impossible.
I had a rather business that was an AdWords certified partner and I know very deeply how many customers they have had OP’s experience. At this point, it is more important for them to maintain an operation that can ostensibly thrive without humans in the loop than to make money selling ads. That is their strategy, a choice that could have been reversed any time in the past 20 years. See how even their own employees are completely unable to help customers. I think it’s dogshit stance and they should be punished throughly in the marketplace for it. That’s just impossible now due to their size.
I couldn't disagree more with you. For anybody selling online, Google brings most if not all paying customers and other search engines bring so few as to be irrelevant. If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete? And don't say that they suffocate competitors because of their size, because they can't bully Apple, Facebook or Microsoft by size.
I don't like Google as a company, they censor, they are corrupt and they mistreat their customers such as OP. There are also search engines that are far better.
But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living. Don't let your hatred blind you. There are fully legitimate businesses that shouldn't be brick-and-mortar and rely on a fair way to get their information out to lots of people. Google makes that possible - for free!
> If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete?
> But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living.
Please note that competition in search market is different from providing small businesses with advertising opportunities. The "blessings" came from their position being the dominant search provider, not from their being Google.
> Please note that competition in search market is different from providing small businesses with advertising opportunities.
Search and advertising has the same function: Reaching out to your public. If we look at the humane side instead of the business side, Google helps individuals with a message get a voice and reach out to the world in a way that would be impossible before. Only social media can compete in this, but they are much more heavily censored and suffer much worse discoverability.
I mean, your argument could be applied to any business or anybody who does anything. But the ground truth is that Google did it and kept doing it right for many years. Another dominant actor might have decided to do things other ways, such as maybe letting local business boards decide who gets to appear in online search.
Mergers and Acquisitions
https://qz.com/1920334/the-acquisitions-that-built-googles-m...
From the lawyers in that case: “There are no reasonable substitutes for general search services, and a general search service monopolist would be able to maintain quality below the level that would prevail in a competitive market”
I've been using a much better search engine than Google for months now. The free market of the internet and human ingenuity has delivered.
I never understood why more businesses don't use discount codes to know where their marketing is having an effect. That's ground truth.
Companies today are just like life. They don't care about the individual. Just like Life has no problem killing a young innocent child with cancer, Google has no problem killing a thriving business with policy.
For every one person who got a chance, a thousand more were taken away. Such is life, and everyone plays a role not any one place or person. If you want answers on why you got the short end of the stick, you might want to re-evaluate whether you should be spending time worrying about it in the first place.
Unless you are endeavoring in the same business path again, I'd invest my time in retraining and rebuilding rather than getting answers you feel you are owed.
I often ask myself why things are this way, but they are and no amount of getting frustrated will ever help. Even though I might be fully entitled from my point of view, even if I had the worst possible life ever, even if I deserved justice more than anyone else on the planet--it wouldn't matter. Never happens, take it from someone who has been at the absolute lowest and highest and online since the beginning.
Oh right, and the millennials I hate to say it are going to end this world anyway. Everyone knows history will repeat, even if it takes a bit longer to do so this time around. Oh my, I am getting so off topic it hurts, sorry 'bout that!
> For every one person who got a chance, a thousand more were taken away.
In my view for every one person who lost his chance, a thousand got theirs from Google.
I'm sure many people lose their jobs when an advertiser is banned for some dumb and false reason.
I'm sure some people fall into depression and commit suicide when their life's work is destroyed.
Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases? Especially when it seems like an honest mistake with no bad intention?
PS: The most aggravating part is that this doesn't even prevent bad actors from using various techniques (identity theft or mass-spawning lots of companies in some lax foreign jurisdiction) to continue operating. This just screws over normal people who fall into some kafkaesque trap based on some rule they didn't know about.
I was in a different but comparable situation with Google. I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.
It's a trivially foreseeable situation, and trivially detected. I bet it's quite common too. If a reasonably intelligent person sat down for five minutes to think about the cancellation process they would identify this branch.
Either those expensive product and software people are incompetent, or they genuinely, deliberately, don't care about edge cases. I can only conclude that it's the second option.
The popular hypothesis is that they couldn't operate at scale without keeping customers away from humans at all costs. But I'm not sure it's true.
What about sending them a physical, certified letter? Have your lawyer write it.
The punchline is that the American collections agency they use actually do respond to email and (I believe) dealt with it. But for it to go as far as a collections agency was nuts.
> I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.
You should!
But the threatening emails came from Mountain View.
This page is all you get: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275
The main thing Google has been consistently great at is designing algorithms and systems to process large amounts of data efficiently. You can't take that away from them, of course.
But that's one of the smallest parts about building beautiful software.
When it comes to other important things: understanding how to build products that are loved(particularly in the social space), or understanding the human element, they've been woefully inadequate on a comical level.
Interesting
If you penalize people for engaging in link-farming SEO, the SEO people who's tricks don't work anymore will go into business doing "negative SEO" for hire or as extortion. When people use DDoS as an act of protest (I don't know if this still happens but it did circa 2010 when the Anonymous hacktivist movement was active), you can view that as similar "community moderation" to flagging posts on HN, but on the IP level. (I am not endorsing DDoS, I am just illustrating the duality. My point is technical and not political.)
Keep this in mind when you write moderation primitives. They will be abused.
Look, they have an app that makes money. They care only about the app.
The only proper response is to take what you’ve learned and make your own app, an app that plays within their undefined rules. Oh, and makes money.
They don’t care. You’re an error, an exception, and a money pit. Better to cut ties than to deal with you. If the product is spoiled, throw it away.
i did some google advertising, and tried to do more, but got banned -- one of my sites/accounts -- for illegal category or something -- i was trying to launch a tech support business -- which i guess had been banned because of the indian tech support scams (sorry, my indian peeps).
i was thinking about doing about a grand over the first month -- then see what i had -- i thought it was weird, first of all, because... why let a tech support business sign up to advertise if... you don't allow it?
but then, you do allow it.
until you don't any longer.
and in the banning and unbanning, i would get calls from google account managers wanting to help me set up my account(s), and they didn't know which ones were suspended and why, and couldn't do anything about it/them, and couldn't tell me anything about it/them.
none of it _really_ suprised me, but also, all of it did.
i kind of thought, oh, i'm gonna just turn on some ads and see if anyone starts clicking - i'll literally know in about 5 minutes if my business is gonna fly - this is gonna be awesome.
but it was a few weeks of back and forth and emails and support centers and phone calls and frustrations and business changes and on and on and on.
and the infamous -- what do you call them -- google UIs -- the banality of evil of google's UIs -- that's how i'd characterize them. you interact with them, you do things, you submit things, and they just stare at you and occasionally blink. no change of state. nada. pretty hardcore.
the frustrating part was - i didn't know all that. if i had a friend who knew what this kafkaesque (i don't know what this means, but people say it a lot and i think it means 'bad') world could be like if you didn't know how to navigate it properly, then i would have had very different expectations, so probably a very different overall experience.
my timeline started telescoping outwards -- from an expectation of ads running within 5 minutes, to and hour, to 2 or 3 hours, to a business day, to a business week, to two weeks, to a month plus, to alternatives like fakebook and all the rest.
my realistic expectations now, were i to attempt again to advertise, or to help anyone else do some google ads (god help them), it'd be like....
I have zero sympathy for Google when it comes to their monopoly potentially (hopefully) being challenged both by competitors and lawmakers.
Also, lead generation can help with this problem. I don't know what you sell, but let's imagine it is eco phone cases. So, you register a domain name bestecophonecases.com with a new company(no law prevents you from that) and open a Google Ads account from another company, phone number and website. From accounting point of view, this company is 0 profit advertisement agency. With lead generation templates and webflow, Tilda and other cms it all can be done within a day. Saying from my personal experience, after I purchased a 20 years old domain name that was banned in Google Ads 10 years ago which they refuse to unban.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23193857
5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912
These worries don't matter as much if you're large enough to have a human sales rep, but as a smaller company, a false positive algorithmic suspension can shut down your business.