Hats off for Google AdSense customer service

I have been using Google AdSense for a while (click the link to the right if you’re not a member) now and never making large amounts of money. However it is enough at the end of each year that it feels like a little christmas bonus.

I registered with them when I lived in Panama, where I had a very convenient US mail box service. Basically a US postal address that gets airshipped to Panama daily. It’s very convenient for magazine subscriptions, amazon etc. So this was the address registered with AdSense. When I moved to Denmark last year I went to change my address to my new Danish address so I could receive my money intime for christmas.

But what did I see? No option to change country. My solution in the end was to use first my moms address and then a friend of mine. However that is not really satisfactory as a long term solution. In particular when I noticed that they will now do direct credits into Danish bank accounts.

I then decided to just go ahead and register a new account, which I should have done a long time ago. A day or so later I receive an email from customer support, saying that I already have an account and I can’t have 2 accounts at the same time.

I replied explaining my situation and to cut a long story short they were more than forthcoming and friendly about it and explained the procedure for flipping countries. Yesterday they sent me my new account details and I have now updated all my AdSense code to the new details. All I am waiting for now is for them to close down my old account and transfer the remaining funds over.

I have seen so many companies that are so fixated on procedure and legal compliance that they become scared to actually help customers out. I’m glad to see that AdSense has not done so and could help me out in a situation that (PayPal) for example has refused to fix.