WTF – Google Promo Codes For Adword Accounts No More Unless You Use Credit Card?

For the vast majority of Google Adwords users out there this rant will likely not apply to you. For those of us who setup new accounts often and have sufficient spend levels to be invoiced from Google pay attention.

The promo codes you have no longer work – unless you want to setup a client with a credit card. With the new Adwords interface, gone are the days when invoicing and promo codes for new PPC accounts live happily together.

The reason I bring this up now is that up until last week, if we called Google they would apply the promo code for our new accounts. Yesterday they put the stop to this practice as well. Here is what the email Google sent us said:

“Thanks for you patience while ****** and I looked into your question. I understand that you would like to add a credit to your client’s account.

Unfortunately, I checked with our specialist team on this issue and found that clients on invoicing do not have the ability to apply promotional credits. I also looked into several options for us to manually apply credits to your account and ran into the same problem that credits cannot physically be apply to invoicing accounts, which is simply a limitation of our invoicing system. This is something that our engineers are actively working to correct in the coming quarter. I’m very sorry I was not able to find a work-around here for you.”

Is this another step towards Google Adwords wanting to push out Agencies?

This is a BS answer. I’m sure your ability to do it last week and all of the sudden have this “limitation” on your invoicing system is a policy move and not a real hurdle. I with Google would have the balls sometimes to actually say “we just decided to screw you over because we know we can”. I would still hate the for it, but dammit I would respect them for it.

Part of me is thinking it was bound to happen because promo codes are meant to get new people interacting with Adwords. Maybe it was inevitable, but I’m still going to be mad about it for the rest of the day, especially since I just read Google is also screwing over Orkut users too.