Free phone support for AdWords advertisers | Hacker News Reader

Free phone support for AdWords advertisers

googleblog.blogspot.com

20 pointsshawndumas10 comments

That's not "free".

"we’re always looking for new ways to support you"

Really? REALLY?

How about a web form where you select a department, send in a support question, get a ticket number and eventually a response? FTFY. I didn't even go to Yale or pass your interview process and I could figure that out.

Call me bitter, but I'm an Android Market developer and what do I get???? How about pages and pages of desperate Android users and Developers asking questions into dead space:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/label?l...

Yeah, but these questions are unanswerable:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?...

The way to get these questions answered is to ask your OEM or carrier. Verizon has a ticketing system, as does HTC.

Hogwash. Look through those questions. Look at all the help needed for download issues, error messages, install issues, developer console problems, stats problems, payout problems for sold apps, uploading issues, etc, etc, etc. If I emailed HTC and asked why I couldn't upload an update to my app for the last 4 days they'd tell me to go to Google.

I guess the question that I always have in this case is "why do you care". You can't upload an update to your app. It's your problem, not Google's. They don't need the money from your app. The Marketplace exists to have something, not to have something good. It's a checkbox for people thinking of licensing Android, which is where Google actually "makes money".

The problem that people have is that Google matters more to them than they matter to Google.

I thought their April Fools pranks were a little lacking this year- I guess that's why. They were saving their best one for today.

My adwords account suddenly stopped displaying any ads about a year ago.

As I tackled the problem, my understanding grew that the Google's Adwords support staff didn't have any additional information than what was already published online. That kind of support is fine for maybe 50% of your users who don't read the online docs. Probably not of use to HN readers.

I suspect that Google doesn't provide information about recent changes to algorithms to the support staff that would help them understand what's going on. I can understand why they might not want to, but it reduces the quality of support that can be provided.

It's part of their "local" push in order to bring back the tons of small business customers that tried adwords once, didn't know what they were doing and got burned.

Interesting to see how this goes. Adwords is so competitive that it's almost too expensive for small guys to hire big agencies & too time consuming to learn for small businesses to figure out themselves....

An ad platform with good support and a simple interface would make a lot of money.

I'm new to internet ads, just launched my first psuedo-product as an experiment. Anyway, while waiting for Google to approve an AdWords campaign, I went to check out Bing advertising. Popup says: browser unsupported. Chrome. Promptly closed the window. The only reason I'm even using Google is that they gave me free ads. This whole system sort of sucks. Maybe I'll go check out Project Wonderful now. At least they have a memorable name.

This is great. I really, truly hope it's part of a broader effort to unsuck their customer service.

Hell has frozen over.

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