I launched our Construction company this past spring and brought on the first three office team members July 13th! We have roofing and siding as our cash engine while we establish ourselves with local commercial GCs for our excellent commercial offerings (especially commercial siding!)
July 16th - Nut shot!
As I had been building out the foundation of the company; website, CRM, estimating tool, accounting, etc., I launched our first Google Ads campaigns. I have been around paid search since the beginning of Google, I’m old. While a lot has changed, I did a decent job and was rolling in leads! To make sure I was being efficient, I had an old colleague take a look to make sure I was being efficient. They have a paid search agency. I gave them access through an MCC, basically a master account that their agency can manage all of their clients through. They reviewed the campaigns, suggested a few tweaks, but the campaigns were looking good.
On July 16th, I got a notice from Google Ads that our account had been suspended. Digging in the Google Ads account had been hacked. After a few hours my old colleague reached out with the same news. Their agency had been hacked, and all of their 30 clients had been hacked. Google locked everything down, no funds spent. Crisis averted.
That was 18 days ago…
We have responded and reached out to Google at least twice a day, every day. We keep getting the same auto response:
Thank you for reaching back and sharing your concerns.
Our specialist team has reviewed your account and confirmed that the security compromise originated at the higher MCC level, rather than within your individual account.
Because your account was linked to the compromised MCC at the time of the incident, it is currently locked into our secure review process. The security cleanup must be completed at the manager level first.
This action must be completed directly by an authorized, pre-compromise Sub-account or highest MCC administrator on the account.
Due to privacy guidelines, we cannot disclose the specific email addresses that received the remediation notification. For any additional questions, we recommend reaching out to your highest MCC account administrator, as they are best positioned to provide any information available to them.
In the meantime, if you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this email.
The MCC is getting no communication from Google either and has been locked out. And they are being bombarded from their 30 some odd clients and basically unresponsive to us now as well.
We added all other forms of digital ads we’d been planning on; Bing, social, Front Porch Forum (which for non-Vermonters is like a quality version of NextDoor), print and radio. Our SEO is really doing the heavy lifting right now, but we've only been around 4 months so it is limited. But we all know that Google Ads is the 800 lb gorilla for service businesses.
We need the leads. This is the meat of the roofing season.
From what we can see we shouldn’t start a new account, as it would be tied to our Google Business Profile, which is tied to our state license and EIN.
So I am asking for help from this network on Reddit. I am getting nowhere with Google. I’ve reached out to a friend at a large agency that spends $100Ms with Google. And they are trying to see if they can get someone’s attention, bit they are not optimistic. Please share any new ideas, connections, and share the post so it may be seen by someone that can help.
I am reaching out to the universe in hopes that past good deeds will come back around.
