Google’s support for AdWords has always been pretty good if you’re an agency – you don’t have to manage that much budget in order to get a dedicated account manager who can help you with queries and so on, and this can expand into help acquiring new business, technical support and all other manner of things. This is today’s new expansion of this, in that new customers are being encourage to phone Google directly for help.
It’s an interesting move, as dealing with the questions that are going to come from potential advertisers (and I should know!) are going to be many and. Partly too, this reflects the increased complexity of AdWords. The old, simple bidding structure is now lost in a fog of ‘quality score’ and for people to carry on using AdWords to sell their products, Google will have to engage in a very big education exercise.
Of course, the advertisers are going to have to bear the cost of this somewhere down the line (probably in addition to the 5p per minute phone call) and thanks to Google’s increasing murky charging structure I wouldn’t be surprised to see minimum bids drifting ever further north.
There’s also an interesting question about Google’s relationship with the agencies who traditionally drive business to AdWords. Having dropped some of the reward methods they’ve had to encourage agencies over the last year or two and now encouraging people to contact them directly it suggests that Google are looking critically at the role of agencies.
They also, lest we forget, offer their own ‘optimisation’ service and will carry out any number of research projects for new and existing campaigns. This will centralise things, and lessen the role that the agencies play. Is that a good thing? I don’t think it is. Agencies play a useful middleman between the needs of Google (higher costs per click, more advertisers, bigger budgets) and the needs of advertisers (lower costs per click, better clickthroughs vs. competitors, lower budgets).
Google’s own account creation and analysis is far patchier in my experience than the work that a good agency would do. Given that agencies already struggle to monetise AdWords management below a certain level it will have interesting implications for the pay per click management market…
I have been using Adwords for the last 2 years and i can only say that it increased my online sales by about 20%. The pay per click cost of Adwords is even cheaper than Adbrite. I love Adwords.