Valentine’s Day Flowers Adwords: ProFlowers telling shoppers seeking local florists BY NAME in Google searches that the stores were sold out of flowers.

Over the Valentine’s holiday, a disturbing Proflowers ad appeared during searches for local florists that suggested that they where sold out for Valentines Day. Chez Bloom a florist in Minneapolis, MN did a search for their business using their own business name and discovered this misleading ad that appeared above their business map.This was going on all over the web.

This is a concern because Google places adds within our business listing on our google place pages.

Google also allows misleading ads to appear within it’s ppc advertising platform. Here From You Flowers pretends to be Central Square Florist. Google should reconsider allowing these ads to appear. It creates confusion and we only see this hurting Google’s reputation by tricking visitors into clicking on another ad.

One Google advertiser, named From You Flowers based in CT who also handles Pro Flowers same day delivery flower request, inserts our store name into their web site. This has caused customer confusion. I had to spend 10 minutes on the phone convincing her that this was not my web site. She had seen a similar item on their web site that she had ordered from me and was questioning the price difference. Many other florist are having the same problem with these tactics.

Lots of local florists took note of the ad scams and thankfully my friends at Avante Gardens and Everyday Flowers also blogged about it.