Using the Google Ads Community
Previously known as the Google Advertiser Community, the Google Ads Help Community is a forum where digital marketers and businesses can ask questions about Google’s ad products. The Google Ads Community should be your first choice if something goes wrong with your Google Ads campaign.
Google Help Communities is the place to visit if you’re a Google user with questions or feedback about some of Google’s products and services. You’ll be able to discuss products and services with other Google users and experts, provide your tips for using Google products and services to other members of the Community and get help from other users at the same time.
While you can also look at the Help Center, it’s nice to hear from other people! By using the Ads Community, users will instead receive answers from community members, including like-minded colleagues and experts, who are honoured in this way due to the volume and quality of responses that they post. We’re going to discuss the Google Ads Community platform and how you can use it to help you out.
Navigating the Community
You must sign in to your Google Account to post to the Google Ads Community.
When you create a new thread or reply to an existing one, Google will make a username for you, based on your name. You can change your username whenever you want- click on ‘Edit’ to switch to your desired name and click ‘Done’. That’s all you need to do!
After you’ve done that, you don’t want to waste time looking in the wrong section of the forum. Google has simplified the page with categories to make it super fast for you to find the answers you need.
The categories include:
- Setup and basics – troubleshooting for account and campaign creation
- Ad approval and policy – to determine why Google may reject your ads and what they need to contain or exclude
- Billing – for payment issues
- Learn with Community – for everything else that doesn’t fit into the other categories
These are pretty self-explanatory and are easy enough to follow. Make sure that you’re looking in the right place to match your question.
Tips for New Users
There are over 80000 members of Google Ads. It’s important to know where to begin to fit in with these users.
- Do you have a burning question about using Google Ads? There has been a similar question posted and even answered by a member of the Community. You can find your much-needed answer by typing your question into the search bar and clicking on the most pertinent thread suggestions.
- Did you struggle to find the right thread or answer? You can click on ‘Ask now’ to raise your question and follow the rest of the instructions. For a speedy reply, remember to choose the most suitable category and add specific details to your question.
- Don’t share any of your personal information, including your account ID, email address or banking/card information. None of this is necessary to use Google Ads Community!
- Have you stumbled upon a thread that looks promising, but has an overwhelming number of responses? You can look out for recommended answers – the thread creator has chosen these as the most helpful or relevant. Don’t forget to do this, too, especially if you receive a great answer to your question. This feature can be useful for other users.
- To post a new thread, click here!
- It might be a good idea to look through the Community for posts that could turn in to the content. For instance, if you’re noticing a common thread or trend, it may be worth investigating and writing about. Of course, this should fit your brand and business tone and style – you shouldn’t start writing a ton of technical ad posts if you’re a clothing merchant, as an example!
- When posting, only use concise and clear subjects and content. You should not post with all capital letters. Include only essential URLs and details in your post, because the admins will remove posts with excessive or irrelevant URLs.
- Remember to be respectful of other people. If you disagree on an issue, stay polite and don’t assume the worst of others.
Google Ad Experts
The Ad Community is here to help advertisers improve their performance and share their tips for best practices. It’s continually evolving to help connect experts and like-minded advertisers in one place. The goal is to achieve improved Google Ads performance.
The most priceless resource you’ll ever find on the Community is the experts. They frequent the forum on an hourly, weekly or daily basis. These experts are part of Google’s Top Contributor program, and each has years of professional experience with AdWords. They’re also passionate about helping other Community members in their endeavours.
Most of the experts have a specific area of expertise. For example, some experts have businesses involved in one aspect of Google Ads who have posted thousands of responses over the years.
You can apply to become a Product Expert yourself by clicking here. By helping others, you’ll gain perks and bonuses such as social badges that are only obtainable by experts. The two ways to contribute are replying to posts and providing recommended answers. Of course, you should only apply to this if you have years of professional experience with using Google Ads.
There are different tiers of experts, namely Silver, Gold and Platinum. The higher your tier, the more opportunities you receive to network with other experts, test out beta features and gain new badges to display on the Community.
Aside from applying, Google Community Managers may also choose members with product knowledge and a knack for assisting others to become Silver Product Experts. When you start answering more and more questions in the Community Forum, you will then become eligible to upgrade your expert status.
To reach Gold Product Expert status, you need to be an active Silver Product Expert for at least three months. During that time, you must be respectful and friendly to community members, give high-quality and professional answers, and demonstrate strong product expertise and enjoyment of helping other users.
Please make sure to read more about the Product Experts Program if you’re interested, including the Terms and Conditions.
Complaints
There’s more than just a forum available for you to share your voice. You can also fill in a Product Feedback form or complaint if you encounter any issue that you can’t solve, or if the advice received from an expert was poor.
If you do need to complain, remember to add in as much detail as possible for the best results. You may also be called by Google Customer Support once you submit your complaint.
Terms of Use
By participating in the Community forums, you agree to follow the Support Forums Content Policy. Breaking these guidelines may result in your post removal. Severe abuses of this policy can lead to harsher penalties, including warnings or in extreme situations, removal of your access to the GoogleCommunity Forums altogether.
If you see a post or behaviour where you feel that someone is violating the guidelines, you should report their post/thread for further review. Click ‘More’ and then ‘Report Abuse’ to do so.
Please note that community content isn’t always monitored by Google, and may not always be accurate. Additionally, Google employees do not make posts.
While Community Forums makes every effort to be helpful, users can and should also refer to the official Google Help Centers or Policy documents for the most up-to-date, authorised and accurate information and assistance. Please read the Google Terms of Service for more information.
Need More Help?
If you want some more official help, check out the Help Center. The Help Center contains a database of articles that cover a wide range of topics, including a host of supported languages. It works similarly to Google Search, but the content is restricted to Google Ads Support.
The Google Communities Help Center is there to help you figure out how to navigate the forum. It includes topics such as creating or replying to posts, profile and badge overviews, how to subscribe to threads and adjusting notifications, and how to search for and filter through topics.
You can find out more about this here.
Conclusion
Google Ads Community is beneficial. It’s an essential feature because it allows you to communicate and help out like-minded advertisers who likely face the same challenges as you.
You’ll be sure to find a lot of interesting, annoying and complicated topics once you start sprawling all over the forum. It can be a great time-sink; but only if it’s helping you learn more about Google Ads and how you can improve your performance.
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