While dealing with Adwords Support is never an easy task, it is actually much improved versus how Adwords Support was just a couple of years ago. As it stands, as an advertiser, you’re able to contact Adwords Support for just about any issue in your account, including performance, billing, reporting, or other questions or concerns. You can do this through a very simple to use interface which is located under the Help tab in the upper right hand corner of your Adwords interface. There are three main options: Email support, live chat, or phone. The email support has a feature we use constantly which allows you to take a screen capture of the page and send that to Adwords Support with the request. This enables them to understand your question much better and allows them to route you to the right place.
Many of our clients have had problems with Adwords Support. Why is this? Providing customer support in a company as large as Google and a product as wide-reaching and diverse as Adwords is no easy task. There are currently millions of Adwords customers and an obscenely wide range and industries all use Adwords slightly differently. Also, as we note in our content about Adwords Training, Adwords Coaching, and Adwords Learning, Google is great about rolling out new features that completely change how Adwords works. So imagine the complexity of regularly training and retraining their support staff to understand and answer questions about this ever-changing product, especially as it develops in the face of new marketing and technology needs.
Another reason why Adwords Support sometimes falters, is that Adwords is a highly technical product. For SearcherMagnet to be able to run Adwords campaigns, our employees and our company have had to become certified through a series of testing, and we run our campaigns based on a collective eight years of experience. Adwords Support reps probably have less experience than that, and can rarely provide deep, thorough insight into specific issues. Another problem our clients commonly have is that they sometimes have no idea what is wrong with their account. Without a thorough understanding of the problem, Adwords Support will almost never be able to fix it. The job of a support rep is to open a ticket describing your problem, and then close it as soon as possible. If this can involve skirting the issue entirely or providing a partial or temporary fix, that is what will happen. While Adwords support is in our opinion vastly superior to the support of many other companies, it can still be very frustrating. Especially with issues such as site policy, ecommerce, or more technical or esoteric functions of Adwords.
A question our clients often ask us is, “How do you get support?” A Google Certified Partner such as ourselves has an assigned rep who is directly responsible for the clients we manage. This is far superior to having to deal with the main Adwords Support line, because our rep has direct access to that feed. In most cases, he is able to very effectively problem solve without having to go through the official channels. The fact that he is indivdually assigned to our agency allows us to build a rapport and working knowledge with him so that he understands the goals of our direct response clients, as well as their wants and needs. Having a dedicated Google rep tends to cut down on the amount of Adwords support inquiries that we have had to file dramatically. You may be wondering how you might be able to get a dedicated rep. The answer is that it is pretty much impossible unless your company is spending at least $5,000 a month. Since as an agency our aggregate spend is much larger than that, we are able to provide this concierge service to all of our clients.
Here are some tips to effectively deal with Adwords Support:
- Insightfully, clearly define the issue in your Adwords account
- Offer supporting evidence: Dates, statistics, screenshots, or other supporting material that documents the issue
- Link the support request to a reason that translates into meaning for the rep. For example, tell the support rep “I would like this problem fixed in my campaign because I plan to increase my budget”
- Be patient
- In the initial conversation with the rep, make sure they fully grasp the issue that you’re having. Have them repeat it to you
- Ask the rep if he is 100% sure that he is capable, with his resources, of addressing the issue. If not, ask him to escalate the issue to the appropriate team. There are many different policy teams in Google, such as Billing, Site Policy, Compliance, etc. that sometimes need to solve advanced issues. If this is the case in your situation, it is imperative that it get in the hands of the right team as quickly as possible
- Sit back and relax
If all this seems bad, remember that just 2 years ago the only support available for Adwords was email, except phone service for advertisers above a certain amount of spend, and this email support was only available through a labyrinth of help desk items that did their best to confuse you and get you to select an option that didn’t relate to your issue. We applaud the recent modifications to Adwords support and have noticed that the response time is faster, there are still plenty of issues when dealing with Adwords support. Best of luck with your issue, and if you have a specific issue please let us know. We have spent almost a decade working with Adwords and can offer help with almost any issue.
