Comments on: In Software, It's All About Distribution – And Inventory

By: David Burdon

David Burdon — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:57:53 +0000

John,

I picked up a reference on V7N to your comments regarding Adwords being too complicated for small business users. I couldn't agree more.

The original attraction of both Overture (Yahoo) and Google Adwords was the simplicity of the system. Since then as advertising professionals have ratcheted up their spend smaller - and perhaps the original early adopters - users have found themselves swamped.

I do a lot of work in the travel industry. The pay per click medium was great for niche tour operators and travel agents. But now the big corporations are switching budgets away from brochures, commissions and offline advertising and blasting the little guys out of the water.

By: Chetan

Chetan — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:03:50 +0000

With windows cluster stabiliazing and microsoft shifting its computing paradigm towards “software as service”, their won’t be a clear winner like Google is now in the search market today.

By: Richard Ball

Richard Ball — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 01:02:06 +0000

The problem with AdWords is that it's not a simple enough solution for most small businesses. John, you've experienced AdWords as a user. It's constantly changing and the interface is geared more for technical people. Are most small business owners going to understand what to do when their keywords are marked inactive for search? For adequate local coverage with the Google platform, you need to run 2 campaigns, one with local scope and one with national scope. The local campaign contains core keywords and the national campaigns contains those keywords paired with geographic keywords. This catches searchers using big ISPs who are routed through proxies. Those IP addresses won't register in the local campaign. Are small business owners going to make use of exact, phrase, broad and negative matches? Are they going to realize that broad matches are now really expanded broad matches and that they're paying for keywords they didn't type in. Do they realize they've been opted into the content network? Do they realize that's not search engine advertising but contextual advertising?

Google needs to create a simpler version of AdWords tailored for Quickbooks users. Their Starter Edition doesn't cut it. Why? It uses the content network and the budget optimizer, neither of which is in the interest of a new PPC advertiser. No, they need a version that only displays ads on Google and the search network. Quickbooks users need to be able to control the CPCs. If this deal is just a link to AdWords with a $50 credit, I don't think this will be all that effective getting small businesses to use AdWords.

By: greg cannon

greg cannon — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 15:56:40 +0000

I’m baffled as to why the StepUp deal isn’t getting more coverage. Another adWords channel is great, but getting small businesses to make their real-time inventory searchable through Google is potentially huge. This would make Froogle’s “Search for iPod near you” feature much more valuable. Right now, it’s very hit or miss. Of course, the value is to the consumer who knows what they want. The discovery process is not as well addressed. But, hey, this could ultimately help move the Froogle link back to the homepage…