Howard Stern Suing Google AdWords
MarketingVox has an interesting rundown on a lawsuit filed by Howard Stern against Google claiming that Google AdWord’s daily budgeting does not work correctly and credits are not given to ad campaigns which Google serves over the desired limit. Google AdWords forecasting, rankings, and budgeting have long been a problem for advertisers and agencies who are trying to stick to a set budget on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Looks like complaining to Google is not just something that small firms do and Google is also ignoring their larger advertisers (or larger named) advertisers who are having problems with the AdWords system.
MarketingVox reports :
Howard Stern and an industrial printing firm launched a lawsuit against Google last week, alleging that the search engine giant fails to live up to its promises regarding the daily budget limits that AdWords users can place over their accounts. The plaintiffs are seeking class action status. They say that Google’s daily budget limits are misrepresented and that Google “continues to bill plaintiffs and all other members of the class in excess of the daily budgets,” creating in effect a monthly budget limit made up of the sum of the daily budget multiplied by the number of days in the month.
Google does indicate that it will refund customers charged more than 120 percent of a daily budget, but the lawsuit gives examples that allege regular violation of this policy, with one example campaign running from between 121 and 162 percent of overdelivery, all charged to one of the plaintiffs.
Being that so many businesses build their marketing budgets around Google AdWords, you’d think Google would be able to get their daily budgeting tool in order. TV, Radio, and other traditional “low tech” media do not seem to have much trouble with doing so – neither does Yahoo.
