How to report Double Serving in Adwords

Double Serving is a very very hateful practice when carried out by a competitor and not recommended to imitate.

Basically, Double Serving consists of showing two ads from the same advertiser for a specific search, this can be carried out by using two different Google Adwords accounts simultaneously.

In more "refined" cases, an advertiser is likely to even create two different websites with fictitious company names, but always offering the same services or products.

But what is this for ?!

The idea behind Double Serving is to be able to capture a higher percentage of users who perform searches related to the service / product offered by the advertiser.

This practice dates from the time when Affiliate Marketing plagued Adwords results and many affiliates sought to "monopolize" the results for certain searches.

Can I do Double Serving too?

Short answer: NOT.

Long answer: Google Adwords penalizes Double Serving since it seeks to ensure that each ad offered by Adwords for a specific search is from a different advertiser, in order to provide a better user experience through the variety of offers.

My competition is doing Double Serving, how do I report them ?!

A short time ago a client of mine had problems with a competitor promoting two different domains that have websites with different designs and fictitious company names, always offering the same service.

Looking at the WhoIs, we could easily verify that both domains belonged to the same competitor, so we proceeded with the complaint.

To report a Double Serving case, you must complete the corresponding form, where they will ask us to specify what the problem is, location of the ad link and where we have seen it.

It is important to note that the Google Adwords team may take a while to review the report made and then it is up to their discretion to consider whether the accounts involved in Double Serving should be suspended.

Have you already had this type of problem with a competitor? 😉