When I was a youngin’ we didn’t have them new fangled thangs like Remarketing or Auto-bidding. No, if we wanted something, we had to work for it! There was no such thing as day parting to change bidding. You had to wake up at 5am to turn on your B2B accounts to catch the morning traffic … walking up the hill both ways with a pack of wolves following you. And then you had to find a power plug at Starbucks!
Okay, so not really. But that is what you will hear a lot of old timer PPC people like me saying recently. Now that the Granddaddy of PPC has bowed out … well the great grandchild bowed out (Yahoo Search Marketing, aka Overture, aka GoTo), we are all grumbling. AdWords has ONE major competitor, and they are trying to keep up, but still not there. I am a big fan of AdWords, but things have been rather annoying lately. When I asked Twitter what this column should be, these were the responses:
There is a lot of sentiment here that someone should be listening to (both parties actually). AdWords gives us leading edge reporting but it’s not always accurate. We get kick ass tools, but they haven’t been updated in a while. There are new tools added every day and it’s getting hard to keep up. But is it them, or is it us? (Talk amongst yourselves …)
Take a step back and look at what we have now. The tools at our disposal are awesome. Think about AdWords Editor and Geo-targeting by Zip Code. Back in the day we could not do have the stuff we can do now. It was a pain to change bids, to figure out cost per acquisition, and to modify for ROI. The PPC community keeps getting bites of fantastic material in reporting (Search Query report anyone?), and it just makes our mouths water.
As noted above, there is also a lack of trust and transparency now. AdCenter, want to win us over? Get going on this front. Keep in mind though that in the end, there is really a reason for everything. Don’t shoot the messenger; MSN and Google are just trying to make things better for the end user.
So the next time you want to throw AdWords out the window for any reason, or when you are frustrated with the Yahoo/Microsoft changeover … remember back in the day. In some ways we really did have to walk uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes on. Both Google and MSN are working hard to give advertisers the information they need to make decisions, but it’s never going to be perfect. However, it is our job to keep them on their toes. I don’t want mine freezing anymore in that damn snow.
