And I know not how to repent

Full disclosure: I hesitate to write this. Maybe it’s paranoia or maybe it’s recession-induced crankiness, but I’m afraid as soon as I click “submit” Google will shut down my Analytics account, or my gmail account, or even my AdWords account (the horror!). Here’s why.

Almost a month ago I launched the www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com site for the user group of the same name, and I thought I’d try out Google’s AdSense on the site. If you aren’t familiar with it, AdSense is sort of the opposite of AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising service. With AdSense, you sign up for free, give them your bank account information, and get a little chunk of jscript code. Then you take the code and pop it onto one of your web pages, and it reads your content and displays a strip of relevant ads along the bottom of the page. Then when your visitors come, and especially when they click one of the ads, you rack up revenue and Google pays you. With as much focus on Dynamics CRM as the content on the DCRMUG site has, I thought it would be a cinch for Google to serve up CRM ads, and sure enough, it worked great! Within days of putting that chunk of code on the home page (on January 15th, to be exact), we amassed enough page views and click-throughs to earn over $5.00! I was psyched – here was a marketing technique that worked, and during a recession even. At our user group meeting in January I let the members know about it, since I didn’t want anybody to think I was getting all pitchy on the site. I wanted them to know that we’d use the (no doubt humungous) proceeds to help defray the group’s operating costs. In the full disclosure spirit, I even put a note on our site, just above the ads, explaining what they were and encouraging our members to click through and buy something from the advertisers.           

Everything was going great. After our $5.00+ day on January 15, we hit a new high of almost $7.00 on January 22 (what is it about Thursdays?), for a total of nearly thirteen dollars. The sky was the limit!

But it wasn’t to be. Yesterday (February 4), I noticed the ads weren’t showing up at the bottom of the page. I logged in to my AdSense account and got what I thought was a mistaken notification that my account had been suspended for “fraudulent click activity”. After a futile search for a way to email or call somebody at Google, I checked my gmail account and found an email from Google that concluded with, and I quote, “If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve taken, please do not reply to this email.”

So, I’ve somehow sinned against the Church of Google (gchurch, I call it), although I’m not sure how. Plus, it turns out that when your AdSense account is disabled you can’t sign in to get your account number, and since you can’t reply to their email (see above), the best you can do is fill out the online “appeal for reinstatement” form (which was a little distasteful since I didn’t know of anything I did that should require appealing). And since the form has your account number as a required field…well, you get the picture. The Big G Machine is apparently quite automated, and very unforgiving when you sin against gchurch!

Now if you know me a little bit, you know my positive sunny self wants to pull a happy ending out of every hat, so here are two morals I take from my run-in with the G-Men:

·         Google seems to be a tightly-run operation. The apparently weren’t happy parting with the $13 all those click-throughs might have garnered us. That kind of shrewd financial management should be applauded in today’s environment.

·         I’d spent almost a month trying to figure out AdSense, and it was high time for another data point in my ongoing Adventures in Internet Marketing. Microsoft Live Search, here I come!