BEWARE of Google Adwords $100 credit!
If you receive one of those $100 credits for Google Adwords, BEWARE!
Recently, I received one of the cards, and used it to promote my ebook for photographers, “How To Assemble And Show Your Portfolio” at www.PortfolioEbook.com. I set Adwords to stop the advertising campaign when the $100 was gone. They had a credit card on the account from a previous campaign, but it expired last year. Even if my settings to stop the campaign failed, the system should have stopped any future charges since the credit card was expired. Boy, was I wrong.
I checked my account every day. When the account was almost empty, I paused the account. The next day, when I checked the account it was active again. I paused it again. The next day it was active again, so I paused it again. I checked for several days and since the account was still paused, I stopped checking.
A couple of weeks later I got an automated message from Google Adwords saying that I owed them $46.57. I was shocked, because I thought the campaign was still paused.
After two months of e-mails going back and forth between the Google Adwords Team and me, they finally credited my account for the full amount.
I thought that the case was settled. That is, until today when I received another automated message telling me: “If payment in full is not received within fifteen days, we will forward your account to our external collections agency.”
It seems to me that Google Adwords has some serious problems, including:
- When you set an account to stop when the account reaches $0, it doesn’t stop.
- A paused campaign can reactivate itself.
- The system keeps an account active by trying to charge an expired credit card.
- Google can’t tell the difference between a credit card with an expiration date of 2010 and 2011.
- When the Google Adwords Team does something, the rest of Google knows nothing about it.
Go ahead and use the $100 credit if you want, but be prepared to spend a month or two dealing with their screw-ups, or pay the extra amount they incorrectly charge you.
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