Google $250 Adwords Credit: Was It a Scam?

Google is having a rough day.  First, they admit to the fact that their Street View team smashed a deer, then, information comes to light indicating that their “$250 Adwords credit” promotion may have been less-than-forthcoming, as a commenter here on the blog pointed out.

Just have a look at this Adwords forum post, and you’ll begin to see how this whole thing is slowly unraveling – as well as the backlash that seems to be waiting in the wings.

First, from a Google Adwords rep who goes by “AdwordsPro”:

“In terms of the promotion mentioned in this thread, what I have written below may be considered as definitive:

1) A very limited offer was sent through the United States Postal Service (USPS) to a selected sub-set of AdWords advertisers. Only advertisers who received the mailer through the USPS were eligible for promotional offer. It was not announced elsewhere by Google

2) I do not personally know how this sub-set of advertisers was selected. However, this offer was not made available to all AdWords advertisers, nor was it intended to be.

3) The mailer, sent through the USPS mail, contained the URL that has been posted here, and in multiple other threads on this forum.

4) The URL was also evidently posted by quite a number of people (who are not associated with Google) on their blogs, etc. – and made to appear as if it were an open offer available to all advertisers. As mentioned above, this is not the case.

5) The resulting confusion is clearly upsetting to those posting in this forum. Unauthorized folks who wrote about this offer have inadvertently created a situation in which entirely unreasonable expectation were set for a lot of folks who read about an offer that was in fact not available to them. You would also be correct if you guessed that the situation was not considered as ideal by the folks here at Google who sent the very limited mailer to a particular set of advertisers.

6) The team behind the offer is taking steps to prevent this sort of miscommunication from taking place, if and when there are future offers of a similar nature.”

Hmmm.  I’m not biting.  Neither are several others in the forum…

“anonymous12345″ writes:

“What a load of crap. We’ve all been had. I agree with Snorrbitz. I also signed up only because I thought I would get $250 in free ads. Luckly I only paid the $10 minimum, so I only lost $10. Next time Google should just send out the coupon codes to people, but not the URL. Everyone shares URLs all over the web, but no body will share their coupon code…well, until after they use it for themselves, by which time the code will no longer work. I would love to know how these lucky ‘sub-set of advertisers’ were selected???”

- and later continues…

“Google has scammed us all. They post a public link that is very easy to find (I mean come on, ‘http://www.google.com/ads/250/v.html’ is clearly a legit ad from Google’s domain) so that we would all find it and sign up like idiots. So millions of users pay the $5 registration fee is hopes to get a magical $250 coupon code ‘mailer’ (which most of us probably had no idea whether this meant email or postal mail). And now Google says, ‘Oops, our apologies, this coupon wasn’t for everybody. This won’t happen again’, after they have made millions of dollars off us suckers who signed up for this! I bet those idiots are in their offices in Mountain View, California laughing it up as they count up the profits they made from this phony promotion. I’m a little upset, we should all get a refund.”

So what do YOU think? Was it all a scam?

P.S. – Also, those Google Adwords templates we told you about the other day are now available. Just visit the “Seasonal” section of the Display Ad Builder gallery in AdWords to get started.  Hey, maybe if you ever get that $250 credit, you can take them for a spin.