Google has finally pissed me off
Well, Google has finally done it. They've pissed me off.
I've been a big fan of Google since the late 90's and have enjoyed watching this small geeky search engine transform itself into a publicly trading behemoth. The search results have been better than those from competing engines, and the product & service offering Google has is actually quite good.
Over the years there have been instances where Google was a little slow to adapt to market needs, but they always did catch up eventually.
One thing that seemed to take forever for Google to implement in their Adwords Pay Per Click service is day-parting (day parting is where you can change your ad bids depending on the day of the week or time of the day). Through my company, Globi Web Solutions, we implemented an automated day-parting service for our clients using Google's API and and a bunch of cron jobs. It was not terribly complicated or pretty, but it made us one of the only players in the market (initially anyway) that had day-parting for Google Adwords.
Aside form such things, Google also has made numerous large-scale, high-impact changes to their algorithms which caused many people to panic - especially on the organic search side of things. My position on these changes has always been "so what did you expect would happen?". There's been a proliferation of abuse and spam in the engines, necessitating them to take action. Hell, as a searcher, I don't want to get pages and pages of spammy results either.
But in March, Google actually managed to piss me off.
I'm a huge fan of their Adwords PPC service. There's no other way to get targeted traffic to your site instantly and be able to react and adjust your campaign without any lag time. Add to this Google's Analytics software, and you can get an in-depth look at your traffic and analyze it within the context of your PPC campaign - nice.
In March though, a new rule was applied which only allows you to have a 1-to-1 relationship between Adwords and Analytics accounts. In other words one Analytics account can only be linked to one Adwords account and vice versa.
At Globi we often run PPC campaigns for our clients. In most cases everything is as expected. We set up the account and then the client logs into the account to enter credit card and payment details. Historically we have had clients without credit cards though, and for these, we would run their campaigns within our own account, and then they would reimburse us the Google expense.
One would think there should be no problem to such a situation, however after a few of these later, we have multiple client websites, each with their own Analytics accounts, but with their PPC be controlled through our own Adwords account.
For anyone else in this boat, let me express how much I sympathize. Once the mess is sorted out there will be some data loss and other fallout.
In hind-sight of course, Google's decision does make sense. They have enabled Adwords Manager accounts for many years now, plus you can have multiple administrative users in one account. There really is no reason why each client would not have their own Adwords account as well.
Oh well - all's well that ends well.
-Andreas
Posted: 2009-04-20 11:16:15
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