I saw a post in another forum where an advertiser mentioned they had been hit with $15,000 in click charges for content ads that were paused. I asked Google about that today and the Rep I was speaking with acknowledged that there was a known problem and they were providing click credits for them. I would definitely notify them.
The bad news is their policy is to provide credits and not to refund the money. This makes the spending surge issues we're seeing even scarier. If your PPC advertising maxes out one or more of your credit cards how long can you operate your business?
When Yahoo featured one of my advertiser's ads on their Yahoo Buzz his ads spent as much PER MINUTE as we normally spent PER DAY. If I hadn't caught it in 36 minutes and turned the account off, every credit card he had in the account would have been maxed out.
I have to commend Yahoo on their handling of that situation. They offered a large credit on the money spent without being asked even though they were "valid" clicks and also agreed to process a refund to his credit card. There were special circumstances involved as I'll explain so this may not always be how they would handle such a situation.
The clicks occurred during the week before Christmas so the expedited shipping charges that would have been necessary to get products in time for Christmas definitely would have had a negative effect on conversions.
The profits from the conversions we did see definitely were not sufficient to pay for those clicks. There is no way to know if they might have if the feature had been done earlier in the season or if the nature of the clicks would still have a poor conversion rate.
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