Hello all,

As you can see, I’m a new poster here. I usually just lurk and take in the discussions, but recently I encountered a situation that’s had me itching for feedback from the search community.

First, a little background. I am the Internet Marketing Manager for a company that spends approximately $1 million per year in Google AdWords (for a lead generation site). We are the industry leader and the top advertiser in our category.

However, over the past month or so, we’ve noticed that several of our competitors have launched what appear to be secondary AdWords accounts using separate destination URLs (it’s actually happening on YSM as well, but for the purpose of this discussion I’ll focus on Google). This has enabled them to have their ads show twice on the same page for a given keyword. Although each competitor’s secondary landing page has a different design and content than the main one, they share the exact same function - to generate leads for the competitor in question.

For example, for the keyword query “widgets,” Company BCD has an ad for their main Web site - www.bdc.com - in the third position, above the organic listings. Their second ad - pointing to the site www.secondurl.info, which is a landing page only - appears in the sixth position in the right-hand column. Again, the two sites look fairly unique, but they are both advertising Company BDC’s services (not two unique services, mind you - but the exact same ones). This tactic for double-serving has been employed by two of the top three competitors in our industry (a third, smaller player has recently jumped on the bandwagon as well).

Now, these practices were in such clear violation of AdWord’s TOS that we didn’t foresee a problem getting Google to stop them. I called our AdWords rep and let her know about the issue, and she said it would be resolved in a few days. About a week later, I received an e-mail stating that appropriate action had been taken against the advertisers in question. However, I then queried one of our popular search terms on Google just to check, and the same two competitors were still showing multiple listings!

So I put in another call to AdWords and told them that the double-serving was still going on, and our rep said that it would be helpful if we gave her a list of the keywords for which it’s happening. It seemed to me that Google was dragging their heels by making us police the advertisers for violations, but I acquiesced and told her I’d compile the info.

Before I start collecting data to send them, however, I wanted to see if anyone out there in the SEM community has experienced a situation like this. If so, what is the most effective way of getting Google to take action? I insinuated (in a roundabout way) that if the double-serving is allowed to continue, then we are going to follow suit - except we’ll do it with four or five separate URL’s instead of just two. Now, I’d much rather have Google resolve the issue according to their TOS, but every day that goes by, we’re seeing a negative impact on our CPC and CPA figures. I mean, if they just turn a blind eye to infractions like these, aren’t they basically telling other advertisers that’s it’s OK to do the same thing?

Please - let me know if any of you have insight into this issue. I would love to hear your feedback, and any comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Unfortunately this is all too common. My own experience with Google on an identical matter had similar results. As always, my dealings with Google are such that they will enforce the TOS but only when YOU clearly document every occurnance of the infraction. If you specify that there are 37 keywords that a competitor is breaking the TOS on, then they will remove the competitor from those 37 keywords...not disable their account or otherwise sanction them. Even then, I've seen competitors re-appear after 3 months and do it again, so we're back to square one policing the advertisors in our industry ourselves.

I can't completely fault Google for this as they I'm sure can't just carte-blanche accept my word and eliminate companies from advertising, and I'm sure they get thousands of such complaints each day which means that it's an overwhelming amount to investigate and act on.

...that being said, I will echo your dissapointment. I still see 300% better return on average from Google than any other online advertising platform, but it doesn't mean that I don't want to see things improve even more!

I saw that tactic used very successfully with a previous company that I worked for. We built one site for a category that drilled down into the sub categories. Then we built a completely separate sites that were specific to each of our sub categories. The Category site looked, and navigated very differently from the sub category sites so it was very difficult to infer that it was the same company behind the scenes. After a while, Google caught on and made us admit the practice. Then they said (my paraphrase) that because the sites maintained enough variety in user experience that it wasn't a big deal.

Anyway, my advice to you would be to send your entire KW list to Google and have them take action. Also, instead of diverting resources and ad spend to multiple sites that essentially perform the same function, just make your site and campaigns the best in your market. I bet you see your results improve again.

Good Luck

If you provide a large number of keywords they should link the two accounts... in other words, they can only have one of them for each keyword... this way Google does not allow both accounts to appear at the same time.