We all know that Google support likes to throw out random and often inconsistent answers to support questions. Well the most most recent one I was given is, "We do this to save bandwidth." Now in today's buzzword-happy corporate world, bandwidth can mean any number of different things. Resources, people power, server power, application power, whatever, I would think Google would have all "bandwidth" issues behind them but this was the most recent reason given to me for an ad of mine not showing.

I was testing out large geo-targeted campaigns for a client of ours when I ran across an issue with the ad not showing up for the keyword. We were bidding on a few words for lets say 'Dog Sitters' for a metro area such as Raleigh, NC but the term 'Raleigh Dog Sitter' was not triggering the ad. I ran the Ad Diagnostic Tool in Google and the reason kept coming up with "CTR for this keyword not high enough, Ad is not shown." Being as this was a new keyword in a completely new account I thought this was a bit odd and began trying all sorts of remedies, higher CPC, adding a few different variations and match types, etc, but with no impressions anywhere to be found. I decided to email my usually helpful, Google Adwords contact and ask him.

After the typical canned response of quality score and landing page issues I gave ol' Google a call and after a little while on the phone with a Rep and a Google Engineer I was told that the Google Adwords system is designed to make keywords that they thought would have very little traffic inactive, meaning they won't serve any ads but they will still show active in your account. There reason for this, you guessed it, "Our system is designed like this for bandwidth issues.”

Let’s just give Google the beneifit of the dougt for a second this is a legitimate reason, I still have beef with them. First off, why not tell us certain words do not qualify and will not be served? We all know they like to keep webmasters and marketers guessing, but this borders on satanical. And secondly, if these words are super low in search volume, why not let them be shown? Especially in my case where the words is super relevant and extremely targeted to a particular area, it would make sense to me to serve it. I thought that was the whole point of the Quality Score, to insure relevant ads are shown.

It seems to be that Google needs to either increase their bandwidth (after all I am trying to make them money) or update their excuse roledex! I can’t be the only one who gets answers from their Adwords rep that seem to be less then genuine or at the least odd, can I?

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