1. My ad clicks went from a steady 500 a day to 1-5 a day and my revenues plummeted. I contacted Google. After one month of of being passed around they tell me they're not allowed to disclose what's wrong, but I can try labeling my ads as "Advertisements" on my site. One month of waiting for that response.
2. Recently Google started clawing back 50% of my monthly earnings at the end of the month. It's typically 0-10%. However, it just jumped to 50% the last couple of months. So they give me daily reports that I'm earning $150 per day, and then at the end of the month they just say nope, we're actually going to only give you half of that revenue. Oh, and we can't tell you why, that's confidential. I searched online and found lots of people recently reporting 30-80% of their revenues are being taken away. No one can get a reply from Google. What's even worse, I use header bidding. So someone opens my site, Google says they'll pay X to show an advertisement to that user, they outbid my other networks, and then a month later they say they can't actually pay that price. Meanwhile, my other ad networks could have shown an ad, but Google outbid them with a price they're not willing to pay.
3. I tried to setup an in house advertisement the other day using Google DoubleClick. The idea is that I create an ad for my Patreon page, and if none of the ad networks I run can pay more than X for that impression, then it shows my Patreon advertisement. Well, Google says Patreon is malvertising, and they won't let me run a display advertisement on my own site, linking to my own Patreon page. What does that notification say in the ad manager? It says they can't disclose any additional information and not to contact them.
This company is a joke. They've collected at least 100k in commission from me, and I get zero support. I'd like to fix that issue resulting in half of my revenue being taken away each month. Nope, no one I can talk with, and if I do talk with anyone, they can't disclose that information or what ad unit is the source of the issue. I need to try making a change, and then cross my fingers that one month later I don't lose most of my revenue. It would probably take a year to understand the issue with monthly experiments. Anyway, I'm in the process of removing Google from my life now. I have zero respect for that company.
I’ve had a gmail account since early beta. I upgraded to their $10 per month for 1 tb storage (which they recently increased to 2 tb). I recently got a better deal from Microsoft so want to switch. So over a week ago I deleted my entire Google Drive. Except it put everything into the Google Drive “trash” that still counts against me. I immediately emptied the trash except that literally did nothing that I could tell.
Then, about 100 GB per day has been freeing up from the trash for the last week and a half. I can’t cancel the extra storage until this is complete or I’ll stop receiving email on my gmail account. At the snail’s pace that it’s freeing up storage on my Google Drive from the trash they’ll be charging me another month. It’s ridiculous. And as a paying customer there’s no practical way to contact them.
Support is one of the things you get if you pay for storage, though?
Yes, and it's completely useless. Their user interface is such an anti-pattern that it has to be by design. All I want to do is delete everything in Google Drive and delete everything in Google Photos. For Google Photos, the fastest way to do this is to zoom out ridiculously, hold the shift key down, click the first photo to delete, then the last photo you can see on the screen and then release the shift key, click delete and repeat like 200 times for the number of photos I had on there. Oh and don't scroll out TOO much or your browser will just crash. Seriously, this is their answer to deleting photos.
And Google Drive is no better. 1.2 TB of files from my drive and cleared out the trash at least 75 times but a week and a half later I still have over 100 GB in phantom files. And suddenly all these additional images showed up when I click on Storage in drive.google.com and you guessed it - I have to delete them one page at a time. It's like they're doing anything to make sure you can't get your account under 15 GB so you can stop paying them money. And their support just gives generic advice like what I've typed here.
I've switched entirely to the new Microsoft Edge for browsing, OneDrive for storage and the only thing I have left is an ancient gmail account that I'll likely be switching over to Fastmail.
I finally solved my problem by interfacing directly with their API and writing a Python script to recursively download larger folders. It's sad that I was forced to do that, but it worked.
I think this is the most troubling aspect of Google (free) services. This is why I bit the bullet a couple of years ago and started running my own mail server. The buck stops here :)
I pay for a personal google account there. It gives me the peace of mind everyone's talking about. And I get customer support when I need it.
My total monthly spend with Google (between myself and my clients) is relatively tiny (under $100 USD).
In my experience, the support has always been stellar. Starts with chat (which I prefer), but if that isn't enough to resolve the issue, it gets escalated to a higher level and an offer for them to call me.
I live in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Haha, I last used it for the same reason :) What a dumb system that is…
But overall I've had success with GSuite support yes. I mean, I've not often needed it, but part of it is knowing that it is there in case my account does get fucked with. Huge reassurance.
For example, they probably get thousands of requests for account assistance. But they have full access to the emails in the account. And related metadata like age of account, volume of emails, other services used (Android apps released, Youtube videos created), and others. It should be simple to create an algorithm to prioritize the requests. So if an account was created a week ago and doesn't have much history? Low priority. An account is 10+ years old and has regular bank statement emails incoming? Highest priority.
And if that's too much work, just provide a paid option. Tell users that if their issue is really important, then pay some amount (such as $50) to get immediate urgent support. The user with a one week old account won't care enough to pay. The spam scammers obviously won't pay. But the user with all bank accounts, brokerage accounts, other important services going through their gmail account? They will likely pay to get assistance.
Instead every account gets the same shitty treatment. They could easily identify the important accounts to look into first using data analysis and algorithms. They're supposed to be good at this stuff! Or provide a paid option. Or do both. Only explanation I can think of is that it doesn't look good enough for a promotion so nobody at Google cares.