Major Site Exclusion Failure

[thomas68]

As noted by Discovery, site exclusion is very important to us, and we process both our web logs and placement reports to identify sites to be excluded every day. For the last 2 days, we've seen a huge spike in sites which we have excluded and yet still display our ads, and generate clicks, both in our web logs and placement reports.

Q: Is it just me or is site exclusion failing for everyone else also?

Further Problems
Now that we see sites that we have excluded and yet still generating clicks, we are in a fix as to how to proceed. We have excluded these sites some time ago, but if we exclude these sites again (say today), the click quality team will report that we have only excluded these sites today and it is perfectly normal that our ads generate clicks 2 days ago. So we cannot exclude them again. And yet, they continue to generate clicks and affect our ad performance.

Q: How do we proceed?

Click Quality Reporting Problems
We capture "leaked" sites everyday. That is sites we have excluded and yet still show and generate clicks. We cannot report them to the click quality team everyday based on my experience. It appears that every time you send the click quality team a report, your report gets at the end of the queue and get a report received confirmation, which is fair. But then there will be no response, until I stopped reporting for a number of days. Only then, after about 7 days, the click quality responded and gave me a refund.

Now if I stopped reporting for a couple of days, the "leaked" sites pile up, and now I have quite an amount of data. Since the click quality team require that we provide Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, Matching, IP address, site name (I also provide referer), these data adds up.

The textbox provided by the click quality team is miniscule and I have to tabulate these data in Excel and paste them onto the report. But too much data and I get an email saying the report has FAILED to be submitted because the header is too large.

a) If you report frequently, your report gets delayed.
b) If you don't report frequently, your report piles up and you have to separate your report into small chunks, with every possiblity that these data might not make it to the click quality team.
c) Report or not, these "leaked" sites continue to wreck havoc in your campaign and ROI.

Q: How do you gurus do your reporting?
Q: How do you gurus solve all these and get back your money?
Q: If Google can design good user interface in other apps, what's stopping them from better design at the click quality reporting page?
Q: Google says I have refunded X amount to you. Can I know for sure, they have refunded the right amount, giving me the breakdown in which click, which site, what amount exactly?

It is pretty sad that "Site Exclusion" does not mean a site is excluded. It means only that a site may or may not be excluded according the Google's whims. It would be super if Google or AdwordsRep can explain further.

[Mel66]

Just a check, Thomas.... these are content network sites you're trying to exclude, right? Sometimes we've gotten bad traffic from search partners, and these can't be excluded via Site Exclusion in the AW interface or AW Editor - although they can be excluded by your Google Rep.

[thomas68]

Originally Posted by Mel66

Just a check, Thomas.... these are content network sites you're trying to exclude, right? Sometimes we've gotten bad traffic from search partners, and these can't be excluded via Site Exclusion in the AW interface or AW Editor - although they can be excluded by your Google Rep.

Yes, positively content sites. I've setup my campaigns to have tags like {ifsearch:search}{ifcontent:content} so I can see clearly if it is a content or search ads.

[Mel66]

OK, that's what I figured. Hmm... AWR, can you weigh in on this as to why this might be happening?

Melissa

[AussieWebmaster]

The filter for search and content is a step few use... we have gotten a lot of information from it too

[thomas68]

After 2 days of site exclusion "Leaks", the leaks seemed to have stopped. However, I have yet to get any response either from the Click Quality team nor the support team. We will see how these goes.

Lately, we have seen many clicks from "patent" sites, and we all know they "steal" contents from somewhere and masquerade as patent sites, these site bring low quality clicks without conversion.

Very popular also are software download sites and these contents are also "borrowed". Again, from our weblogs, we sometimes see the user's keywords and there are no relevance at all, only low quality clicks.

Today, I got a click from a site that shocked me. http://iligan.nu. This "Uber Spammer" seems to be generating words and misspellings from a program, the whole content is intended only for the bots and skipping the "borrowing" of content. I am sure this is only the tip of the iceberg and will only gain in popularity. Your take?

Looks like the landing page quality team, click quality team, site exclusion team has their work cut out for them. Conversions from the last 2 days dropped almost 50%. It's war out there, and we're the casualties.

[thomas68]

I have been contacted by Google and they have issued a small credit because "the technical team has not responded yet". How they come up with the amount to credit, I have yet to find out and will keep everyone posted. I have benefited from these forums, so I thought to share these information, which may help others.

The response from Google included a request for more information, which they could not get because the click quality submission form truncated the information I supplied earlier. I have complained again and again for better interface in this submission form but have yet to see any indication or admission that the form is not "complaint friendly", let alone willingness to improve.

The request for more information, ask for:

• campaigns
• ad groups
• keywords
• matching
• date of click
• time of click
• excluded site url
• date of exclusion
• web logs, referer

Fortunately, I have most of these information otherwise I might not be able to make a full complaint. For those of you who do not yet have these information, my suggestion is that you start storing these information, otherwise you don't have proofs to supply to Google.

[thomas68]

Finally a response from Google:

Our investigating team has found a bug which caused the site exclusion not working as expected. I am happy to report that the issue you reported has now been resolved. Thank you for your patience, and I apologize for any inconvenience caused.

If you continue to see this issue, please send us the raw weblog showing the clicks along with the report that you sent.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at https://adwords.google.com/support to find answers to many frequently asked questions. Or, try our Learning Center at http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/ for self-paced lessons that cover the scope of AdWords.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

My gripes, and I have responded accrodingly:

[1.] I was right, there was a bug which causes me money and opportunities. I am not looking for an "apology".

[2.] I am a customer who pays Google to display my ads. I do not pay Google to be an Adwords bug hunter so that I can spend long hours generating reports for Google. A "thank you" which is lacking, would be nice but still not sufficient.

[3.] I wanted refunds and compensation for the bug which depleted my daily budget and have indicated so, so let's see how Google responded, otherwise why bother tracking everything?

"Most effective advertising" ?

What would be the right thing for Google to do at this point?

[Mel66]

I would say the right thing would be to refund you for the clicks you shouldn't have gotten in the first place - and maybe add on a courtesy credit for your trouble. It's possible they've already done so (have you checked your account to see if there are credits posted?) - but they should have said this in their email to you.

Interesting info, either way - thanks for sharing the details!

[Discovery]

Thomas,

I don’t know if this was part of the issue or not with your leaked sites, however I was tripped up by this about week ago.

The process for adding sites to your exclusion list seems to have changed so that you have to add the site to the site exclusion list and then in a second step save the entire list again. In addition, previously to change to another campaign you had to select a campaign in the drop down menu and click the go button. Now, if you attempt to move to a new campaign before you save the "entire site exclusion list" you will get a pop up alert stating:

"Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?

You have unsaved changes."

Otherwise it will go there automatically.

New 2 step process:



Anyhow, I don’t know if this new process has resulted in many advertisers thinking they added new sites to their list but didn’t. If you have a list as large as ours its not very easy to see what has and has not been successfully added.

[thomas68]

I agree with you (Discovery) on the right thing to do part. For me, I do not use the web interface for adwords but rather rely on the Adwords Editor.

I learned because others shared, so it's only right i do my small part.

[thomas68]

I'll have to admit, it was a misunderstanding as Google did not clearly express in their previous email their intentions:

We apologized for all the inconvenience caused here. I truly understand your frustration. In fact, I am currently working with the investigating team to see what we could do for your case.

I sent you a reply earlier to let you know about the bug because I didn't want to keep you waiting for answer. Nevertheless, I'll keep you updated once we have the decision finalized.

They were wanting to keep me informed earlier. That's nicely done.

[thomas68]

On the 12-13th Dec, the site exclusion failed miserably again, despite assurances from Google that the "bug" has been resolved.

The failure of my upgraded (5.0.0) Asdwords Editor to display excluded sites from all my campaigns, compounded the problem of not being able to further exclude sites. You can't exclude sites which you have excluded because Google will say you just excluded it. The only way you can check whether you have excluded it is through AE. The Adwords web interface is of no use as it clips long site names that it could not display in it's html table. There is no other way you could access this information other than AE.

I made the stupid mistake of not exporting my account in AE before upgrading and thus locked out of this information for a couple of days (since resolved). Note to self and others: Always back up your account data before updating.

My earlier complaint has also not been fully resolved as I have not heard from the Google team about my refunds and credits even after about 2 weeks. So the normal "we will respond within 5 business days" is out of the window.

Site exclusion failure data keeps piling up and it takes too much resources to keep track, while Google continues to take my money and failed to exclude my sites.