Whose received the £400 adwords credit?

[Karimbo]

wowsers, this looks like a very nice unexpected surprise.

I cant get my head around what exactly this offer entails. The body of the email made it seems like we had to agree to accept their ad recommendations.

The body of the email states this, I thought you'd have to basically accept their ad suggestions which wont be very targeted:

We’re here with a special, limited-time offer for your busiest time of the year. Drive growth with Google Ads by pairing your ad credit with personalised recommendations you'll receive over the coming weeks.

Then the t&c states this:

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1.	Offer available only while supplies last.

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2.	Offer available only to advertisers with a billing address in United Kingdom. One promotional offer per advertiser.

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3.	To activate this offer: Enter the promotional code in your Google Ads account by 2025-12-14.

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4.	To earn the Google Ads credit: Once step 3 is completed, provided all eligibility checks are met, the applicable credit will typically be applied within 5 days to the Billing Summary of your Google Ads account.

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5.	The credit expires 30 days after it is applied to your account.

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6.	Credit applies to future advertising costs only. Credit cannot be applied to costs accrued before the promotional offer was entered in your Google Ads account.

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7.	You won’t receive a notification once credit in your Google Ads account is used up and any additional advertising costs will be charged to your form of payment. If you don’t want to continue advertising, you can pause or delete your campaigns at any time.

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8.	Your account must be successfully billed by Google Ads and remain in good standing in order to remain eligible to use the credit.

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9.

Google Ads reserves the right to remove the promotional offer from your account if a payment fails, an offer was mistakenly applied, you breach these terms or your account otherwise falls out of good standing. In such cases, if the promotional credit has already been granted, Google Ads reserves the right to nullify that credit.

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10.	Full terms and conditions can be found here: https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/ads/coupons/terms

 

[Karimbo]

Nice.

It got applied after 24 hours of verification to make sure I meet the eligibilty. I didnt need to accept any suggestions. £400 is credited against future spend.

 

[DoolallyTap]

whoopee I got the £400 credit and increased my daily spend, remember it expires in December

 

[Karimbo]

whoopee I got the £400 credit and increased my daily spend, remember it expires in December

I've decided to not increase the spend and just use it towards existing campaigns. Its good to know someone else got the perk after many ma years years of subscribing to the adowords newsletters.

I couldt get information from this anywhere, when you Google free £400 adwords credit. Its always about the usual introductory spend £400 get £400 offer.

 

[Karimbo]

They do follow up with you after sending the £400 ads credits.

They do get you onto a conference call, and gently persude you to make changes to your ad account which would probably be beneficual for them (more clicks and high bids), change from manual CPC to conversion optimisation.

I hope the chnages do not cost me too much. I accepted their recommendations because they have given me £400 to play with. Normally I would have hung up on them if they called me.

 

[UKSBD]

I hope the chnages do not cost me too much. I accepted their recommendations because they have given me £400 to play with.

The way they have these "Click to Accept Recommendations" things set up is terrible.

I manage a few accounts for people and despite how often I warn them, I still see settings changed which are done because someone just clicked to accept a recommendation without knowing what they are doing.

"You are missing out on clicks, we recommend you increase your daily budget - click here to accept"

Suddenly gone from £20 a day to £80 a day until it is noticed.

 

[fisicx]

They do follow up with you after sending the £400 ads credits.

They do get you onto a conference call, and gently persude you to make changes to your ad account which would probably be beneficual for them (more clicks and high bids), change from manual CPC to conversion optimisation.

I hope the chnages do not cost me too much. I accepted their recommendations because they have given me £400 to play with. Normally I would have hung up on them if they called me.

Their changes often eat through your money with zero increase in leads.

 

[Karimbo]

Their changes often eat through your money with zero increase in leads.

I'll keep an eye on it, if it goes up too much I will tell them it's not working for me.

I have tight phrase matches that will control runaway ad spends, so they haven't made me do anything too stupid. If the ad costs go up too high I will disable the automatic bids.

 

[Karimbo]

It's a complete joke. I havve just emailed them and told them I'm not following their recommendations. they have got me to enable search partners and I got a whole load of visitors from google content network leaving the site less than 10 seconds of clicking with 1 page view. It's a complete joke.

They just want to drum up clicks for google with little regard for the business owner. I just went along with it because they offered £400 credits and it seemed like there might be a method to the madness - but its the same old same old. bid up whatever they need to bid to try to get #1 ad rank and play little regard to the margins the business has to operate in.

I've sent the google rep a polite, thanks but no thanks email. The terms for the £400 vocher isn't conditional on accepting their recommendations. But it seems like they are approching it in a "i scratch your back, you scratch mine", type of way. So you have to humour them a little bit.

 

[UKSBD]

They give the voucher to one person, it pushes up the costs for others, which in turn pushes the cost up for you.

The vouchers can be good but Google probably benefit more than the person receiving the voucher

 

[Karimbo]

They give the voucher to one person, it pushes up the costs for others, which in turn pushes the cost up for you.

The vouchers can be good but Google probably benefit more than the person receiving the voucher

Thats quite a good take actually- didnt think about the wider effect on everyones ad spend. A lot of people will be keeping those changes and wont really realise how much their ad costs have gone up until they do their next p&l - whenever that is.

Funny graph - I wanted to share, but now I've tweaked the ad spend down it's not as stark. there was an impression share graph on my ads vs compeititors. Mine was up to 40%, amazon and everyone else was <10%. Now mine has come down quite it bit. They just want to pump up the spend as much as possible. The specialists they put on the phone to you have no clue about how to run profitable ads, they're just trained to increase reach.

 

[ThatDevAaron]

HOW THE **** DID I MISS THIS OMGGGGGGGGGGGG

 

[ThatDevAaron]

UPDATE: I sadly never even got the offer for this :C - Maybe i don't spend enough on gads

 

[UKSBD]

The specialists they put on the phone to you have no clue about how to run profitable ads, they're just trained to

There are 2 or 3 different levels of them.

1st level are basically just a waste of time, they just trying to get you to get more clicks, irrespective of whether any good for you, ask anything tricky and they just try to set up a meeting with higher up.

You sometimes get to speak with ones who know more and can be helpful.

 

[Karimbo]

I got completely hosed. I lost all £400.

When I agreed to the web call, they went through 2 campaigns to basically do unlimited bids for. There wss a high spend campaign which I did infact reduce down to pre-call bid levels.

There was an ad campaign that was spending no more than £10 a week. A b2b consulting keyword which I do as a side hustle. The adwords consultant also just set unlimited ceiling on that campaign. And I didn't really wind it down. In my mind that campaign never gets any traffic, so lazy I left it as it after the adwords messed with it.

Many many days after the increase, for some reason almost a month after suddenly, before christmas this keyword is bidding for £16+ a keyword. I lost £350 on pointless clicks. It wasn;t bidding this high beforee. A month later it was doing that.

So almost all the free £400 i got has been rinsed.

Theres no way to appeal this or get a refund. The traffic isnt worth the money spent on it. Google didn;t alert me to tell me my daily ad spend as spiked. I only found out because I loggedf into my online banking and didn't see as much money as I thought I had in there.