Last week I mentioned that Google was offering up to $1000 credit to AdWords advertisers who created Print Ads. I decided to give it a shot and create a newspaper ad.

My initial impression with Print Ads isn’t that great. In fact, I think they’re pretty ridiculous.

• To start with, there was a deadline of July 17, 2007 for the ad to be in the system to run by the date I selected. I had the ad in on July 13.
• For the past 6 days nothing has happened. The ad continued to marked as unreviewed (Google hadn’t looked at it to make sure it wasn’t garbage/spam/etc).
• The deadline of July 17, 2007 came and went with no word from Google as to the status of my ad.
• Today - 2 days after the deadline - the ad was marked “Not Accepted”. No explanation was given as to why.

So in my admittedly limited experience and first run with Google Print Ads, they missed a deadline… failed to communicate with me in any form what was going on… and then declined my ad without so much as an explanation as to why.

As an AdWords customer I’m very disappointed. I expected a much better experience out of Google.

- Matt