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Adwords and Online Gambling
By ShowMeTheMoney | October 5, 2006
I recently emailed Adwords about online poker campaigns. Now if you have ever tried to run a campaign on Adwords that mentions anything to do with online gambling then you will run into the dreaded editorial review process. Basically those ads will get suspended until they are reviewed by an Adwords “specialist”. In the UK online gambling is 100% legal and heavily regulated by the government. (In the US, well what can I say, I think the government has taken a somewhat hypicritical stance about the whole online gambling thing). Now I can see plenty of ads running for the keyword poker in the UK. The real gambling affiliates generally kick their ads off at about 6.30pm UK local time using the Adwords scheduling facility. Affiliate payouts on leads generated for online poker sites are probably some of the best in the business. They can be up to $150 per lead! Anyway after repeatedly having my UK campaigns turned down I sent a somewhat heated email to Adwords support. This is the response I got back:-
“Thank you for your email. In order to maintain fairness for our advertisers and consistency for our users, all Google AdWords ads must follow the Editorial Guidelines and content policy.
We’ve thought very hard about our stance on online gambling advertising, and have decided not to permit advertisements for online gambling. To be as consistent and fair as possible, this is a global policy, applied to all online gambling advertisers and affiliates.
Our AdWords Specialists review ads in our program. Due to the volume of ads we receive, some ads may run for a while on Google before they undergo the approval process. We assure you that we are working diligently to apply the same criteria to all of our ads”.
Ok if this is the case then I am going to assume all those ads that are now running in the UK that have direct links to online gaming sites from their landing pages are going to be pulled from AdWords, right? Either that or the editorial guidelines are not being applied fairly and consistently across all Adwords advertisers. I will be watching for them to disappearelse Adwords is not giving us all a level playing field….. but hey, better not hold my breath eh……….
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