I own a retail newsagency in a major shopping centre as well as Inkfast, an online ink and toner business which I advertise primarily through a Google AdWords campaign. Earlier this week I suspended my Google campaign when daily costs jumped 500% without any increase in sales. I know from recent experience that communicating with Google to discuss the situation is useless since they do not provide personal service. Responses are impersonal and not directly answering any query put. It’s the same with a landlord. Ours decided to do maintenance to the door out the front of our shop during the day, blocking the entrance and killing traffic and sales. This is despite their refusal to allow us to do any maintenance work on our shop during the day. A complaint resulted in an impersonal and irrelevant response.
Major companies like Google and shopping centre landlords need to answer questions from tenants and customers personally. They need to be transparent. They need to stop hiding behind off the shelf double speak as a means of deflecting a serious issue – in my case this week serious concern about possible click fraud.
What is interesting is that Tuesday was our first Google free day in several months. Sales were double our average for a Tuesday.