Dry testing on adwords - asking for a ban?

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mpbiz

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Apr 29, 2010
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I have a couple of ideas I'd like test with adwords, but I want to dry test.

Basically create a quick wordpress site + lander, and then show a "sold out" message or some other type of error after someone enters all of their payment info and clicks submit. If enough people try to buy, then I'll actually invest the time to create the product.

The only problem is I have a live campaign right now on adwords and I'm not trying to get my account banned.

So, is there a way to dry test on adwords without getting banned? If you don't want to post publicly feel free to shoot me a PM.

Thanks for the help.
 


If it's not too niche product I'd try it on FB/POF first and maybe a few 2nd tiers.
 
jr_sci said:
For a campaign i started last month, Bing/yahoo worked way better than adwords for me. So, don't ignore them. It might convert better.
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This is all truly incredible information and thank you for enlightening me on the effectiveness of bing, yahoo, facebook, and POF but my only concern is:

Can you dry test with google adwords?
 
I've dry tested before using Google but I developed a 20 page site to avoid any potential issues. I also used a throw away domain in case I was targeted at the domain level.
 
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I don't have a lot of posts but spent the past year mastering adwords and cloaking, here's a simple answer to your question

If your ideas involve
- Skin
- Diet ( JUST forget about it )
- Bizopp
- Auto

Don't bother, they are lot stricter in account reviews.

Anything else go for it, in certain niches pay attention to policies, ie: no penny auction bidding unless kw has penny auction and same for payday loans, don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.
 
I don't see why you wouldn't be able to do this.

As long as you are following all of the policies and stuff. I'm pretty sure there is no policy against advertising pages that have sold out products.

Their bot and human reviewers are not going to try to purchase something, so they wouldn't know if it's sold out or not.
 
I can shed some light on this, but remember Adwords changes up their policies and depending on who looks at your account.. your milage may very.

Dry testing is actually not a good idea. Anything that looks like its just a sign up form only will get you fucked with them at some point, maybe not the day you put it up, but very soon to that date.

If your putting up pages like "under construction" or "soon to launch" or just a form in general, you will be booted.

You need to have a couple pages on your domain with info as well as some good info on the LP itself with the form to make this even work and pass a review. Many people get by for a while, but all of them get caught.

Proscale, I have been cloaking Adwords for about 4 years now on a small diet campaign that actually goes to a rebill and have been fine on it.. so yes it can be done.
 
eliquid said:
I can shed some light on this, but remember Adwords changes up their policies and depending on who looks at your account.. your milage may very.

Dry testing is actually not a good idea. Anything that looks like its just a sign up form only will get you fucked with them at some point, maybe not the day you put it up, but very soon to that date.

If your putting up pages like "under construction" or "soon to launch" or just a form in general, you will be booted.

You need to have a couple pages on your domain with info as well as some good info on the LP itself with the form to make this even work and pass a review. Many people get by for a while, but all of them get caught.

Proscale, I have been cloaking Adwords for about 4 years now on a small diet campaign that actually goes to a rebill and have been fine on it.. so yes it can be done.
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Assume that it would be a legit site, with 20+ pages info, terms of service, contact, 1-800 #... the works.

The only thing is that when someone completed a payment form with their name, address, phone, and cc information, when they click on "checkout", it will give them an error like "Unfortunately we are sold out" or "There was an error in charging your card please try again later".

I'm not trying to cloak or run traffic to a flog or 1-page lander, the only thing that keeps this from being 100% legit is that the product is not created/available yet and I will not be charging any cards at all.
 
r3p1v said:
I don't see why you wouldn't be able to do this.

As long as you are following all of the policies and stuff. I'm pretty sure there is no policy against advertising pages that have sold out products.

Their bot and human reviewers are not going to try to purchase something, so they wouldn't know if it's sold out or not.
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The FTC doesn't allow dry testing and so I highly doubt google does either..

Just curious to see whether you guys have gotten away with dry testing for 3-4 weeks without getting banned.

It's a great way to see if there is even money to be a made with a product before you spend the money on creating it.
 
If you have a payment processor setup I would go ahead and take the payment then either send a backorder email and give them the option of canceling or even better, if you can source the same product for close to break even I would do that.

Regarding being banned for having products out of stock and not letting the customer know until the have gone through the checkout process I don't see why it would be an issue though I have never actually confirmed this through my rep.
 
mpbiz said:
The FTC doesn't allow dry testing and so I highly doubt google does either..

Just curious to see whether you guys have gotten away with dry testing for 3-4 weeks without getting banned.

It's a great way to see if there is even money to be a made with a product before you spend the money on creating it.
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Oh, then I would speak to a lawyer to see if you could put a statement on your landing page saying exactly what you are doing (it's a dry test, we may ship at a later date or cancel your order, blah blah blah)

Surely there is something in the Adwords policies and ToS saying you have to abide by all relevant laws.

If you are testing it out on search, Adcenter/Bing would be the closest thing to Adwords where you wouldn't put your account at risk. FB and PoF are totally different.

Realistically though, as long as everything looks legit, nobody is going to care. I've never seen or heard of Google entering payment info to see what is on the next page. And if it says sold out, they probably won't care.
 
yea i wouldn't decline their cc's 100%. I would still show the error but say you will be billing in 15 days or something in small print.

wait and rebill + offer them w/e they were paying for.

or you can give the leads to someone who can close
 
eliquid said:
Proscale, I have been cloaking Adwords for about 4 years now on a small diet campaign that actually goes to a rebill and have been fine on it.. so yes it can be done.
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Oh don't get me wrong def can be done, but new accounts on diet is like walking into mordor, one simply does not without aging and getting some history on accounts.
 
eliquid said:
Proscale, I have been cloaking Adwords for about 4 years now on a small diet campaign that actually goes to a rebill and have been fine on it.. so yes it can be done.
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Dude, wtf am I missing? Clearly, I'm doing it wrong. Got 4 accounts banned from G about 3 years ago for running diet rebills :/
 
HiGhPeR said:
Dude, wtf am I missing? Clearly, I'm doing it wrong. Got 4 accounts banned from G about 3 years ago for running diet rebills :/
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You are not missing anything, I had account with over 8K spent on skin care, as soon as I added diet offer, first site disapproved, got everything they wanted added, disclaimers, testimonials, etc, then instead of site being approved, account got banned.

I ran raspberry ketones on adwords, for 3 days on just keyword "raspberry ketone" 3rd day acc / site gone.

To be fair I think this happened after ftc slapped google for running "bad ads" especially in bizopp / diet / skin niches.

There's a reason why keywords like lose belly fat in google UK have 1 or NO ads.
 
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