One of my goals in 2012 for MasonWorld.com is reaching more people. I’ve always thought a key to reaching more people is more transparency. Unfortunately, transparency means that I need to tell you about the dumb stuff that I do along with the successes.  Telling you about how I managed to get my AdWords Account suspended certainly meets that goal.  LOL.

As a side note, I make a lot of mistakes in internet marketing. Over the years I’ve done a bunch of stuff that simply didn’t work and a few dumb things. This is one of the dumb things.

If you’ve been following me for a long time you know that I started internet marketing in 2007, around Thanksgiving, when I saw an episode of the Today Show where they talked about a guy who was making $11,000 a month from AdSense. I was so totally fascinated that I started working on internet marketing the next day.

First, You Try Everything

When I first got started I tried lots of stuff (including AdSense and AdWords), because after all I didn’t know anything about internet marketing at that time. One of the things that I tried was CPA marketing. (Cost Per Action marketing) This is a form of internet marketing where you get paid every time one of your prospects takes an action, like signing up to an email list, clicking on a link, or entering their zip code.

You see these kinds of offers all the time.

Right now the most annoying and popular CPA offer that I see is an offer for a free iPad. Those people who are advertising that, in general, are getting paid for every lead that enters their contact information. The people who are running those campaigns generally are not at all interested in iPads or drumming up business for Apple. What they’re interested in generating leads comprised of people who wish they had an iPad.

This can be a very effective form of internet marketing and is generally combined with pay-per-click. So what people usually do is they buy ads from someplace like Google and they drive that traffic to some sort of CPA landing page or some other pre-sales page that drives to the CPA page.

My Early AdWords Experiments

So in early 2008 I was experimenting with this and I was trying to understand how it worked. I did some experiments in one of the most popular high traffic niches there is, weight loss.

Since 2008 I’ve learned that Google has some very strict terms of service for what kinds of sites you can advertise to. If you’ve been reading recently you know that they went through and did a massive audit of Google Adwords and suspended a lot of accounts.

Now, I currently don’t use Google AdWords at all and wasn’t worried about this one bit. But, last week my buddy Josh Spaulding was talking to me about a project that he’s working on and asked me to check something in my AdWords account. Imagine my surprise when I saw the following message at the top of my Adwords account.

Well, of course I contacted Google for more information and they very politely told me that some of the sites that I was advertising didn’t meet Google’s terms of service. Bottom line:  AdWords Account Suspended indeed!  I’m not sure exactly when they suspended my Adwords account, but it hasn’t been suspended for more than a couple of months. I’m really surprised to see that they looked all the way back to 2008 to decide whether or not my Adwords account was okay.

Adwords Account Suspended Forever

Of course I figured this would be no big deal because this happened a long time ago. So I contacted Google and let them know that back in 2008 I ran a brief campaign, this particular campaign was only 49 clicks. I said I believe that the site met their terms of service back in 2008, but obviously it didn’t now, and that I wasn’t running the account now so everything should be okay.

They replied to me with a form letter and said basically once you point to any site that ever violates Google’s terms of service you’re done and have a nice day. While they did reply to me in a prompt manner, their reply was very form letter style and basically they indicated there is no way to ever get your Adwords account back.

Why in the world would Google want to suspend my Adwords account? After all, I’m the client, I’m paying Google money to place ads. The answer is very clearly that Google is first and foremost trying to achieve the best possible user experience. They want to filter ads so that goofy weight loss ads that promise 50 pounds of weight loss in two days aren’t advertised on their network.

Google Has Their Reasons

Think about it this way. If your mom or dad goes to Google and they click on the paid ads, Google doesn’t want junk sites showing up for your mom or dad who may not be very internet savvy and who may be taken in by these scams that admittedly are very marginal from a Federal Trade Commission standpoint.

So here’s my Adwords advice for you.

#1. Don’t take Adwords advice from me. Just kidding, I have lots of Adwords advice, but my account is banned so your mileage may vary.

#2. Make sure that you only advertise legitimate sites that meet Google’s terms of service. For me the best way to do this is only drive traffic to sites that you actually control. I think probably the best way to run Adwords is to drive traffic to your own sites and have affiliate links on that site with content that pre-sells the money sites that you’re trying to drive traffic to. That way you’re always in control of the content on the Adwords promoted site.

#3. Abandon hope of ever getting Google to unsuspend your account. Here’s a snippet of one of the emails that they sent me that shows that they’re not at all interested in dealing with internet marketers. What they really want are legitimate brick and mortar business people advertising in their network, driving high quality targeted ads to real products. They are not interested in internet marketers selling get rich quick schemes or other kind of weight loss junk on their network.

Hello Mark,Thank you for your email.

As mentioned in our previous email, your Google AdWords account has been
suspended due to multiple policy disapprovals. Upon review, we've
determined that this account suspension was made in accordance with
AdWords policy and procedure. For this reason, we aren't able to revoke
your account suspension and won't accept advertisements from you in the
future.

For information on the terms associated with AdWords account use, please
review our Terms and Conditions at
https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder. To learn more about
AdWords policies, including our suspension policies, you can review our
advertising policies at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide_toc.cs&path=policy

We appreciate your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Sonal
The Google AdWords Team

Is Your Adwords Account Suspended?

I hope not, and I hope this is helpful to you.  Maybe you can avoid the mistakes that I made with my Adwords account. If you have any questions about Adwords or any of the other goofy mistakes that I’ve made in my internet marketing career, please feel free to leave a comment below.