SEM Punch

Althoguh the updated AdWords API terms and conditions have been out for quite a while, I have only today gotten around to actually taking a look at them. Clealy, with its explicit call not to provide third parties with access to API tokens Google is gunning at search marketing service providers the like of eFrontier, SearchRev or Omniture.

Account Data. The AdWords API Client must neither enable nor allow any party to access or use any data obtained through Google Scraping. The AdWords API Client must neither enable nor allow any party to access or use the account, passwords, AdWords API Data or any other account information of a party other than the then-current end-user (which includes parties acting on an end-user’s behalf and authorized by that end-user to do so).

At first thought this appears to be a pretty stupid move. After all, agencies & search marketing service providers provide Google with a solid base of advertiers that would otherwise not advertise at all. Small advertisers either don’t have the knowledge of managing their search campaigns or simply don’t have the time & resources to do it full-time. This is where agencies & technology providers add value - expertise and tech resources.

At second thought, however, I think these new TOCs are a sign of and natural response to the maturing search marketing space. For a while Google allowed an API token to be shared, more or less, enabling advertisers to allocate some of their free quota units to agencies. By accessing clients’ accounts and streamlining the management process, agencies helped Google maintain its stellar financial growth without committing extra resources & educating a market. Google had peons to do the dirty work.

Along with the new terms and conditions the Adwords API will emerge out of beta…i know, hard to believe a Google product makes it out of beta ever. What that means is essentially that the API will be supported to a larger degree probably by speeding up transaction time & adding some customer support. Along with blocked access for agencies, middle-tier advertisers suddenly have a pretty strong incentive to start cranking out their own code, desperate for some way to manage their 100,000+ keywords. This gives Google an important advantage it it didn’t have so far: direct access to users’ wallets on top of click charges creative application usage & a direct channel of communication with mid-tier spender’s engineers. These are valuable information sources to drive future development of the AdWords API.

What about the very small spenders though? Nope, Google is not leavin’ them out in the cold…it released a pretty nifty tool that let’s them manage their AdWords campaigns without logging into their account.

But wait a minute - now you have the mid-tier spenders who build their own traffic application and the small spenders using the AdWords Editor. Perfect conditions for educating a market! Just add a feature to the desktop tool and thousands of little advertisers will become more sophisticated marketers over night. I can already see a little window popping up when changing bids that says “Are you sure you don’t want to bid $1.21 more to get into first position? You would get more volume…we promise!” Or imagine an API function called ProfitMaximizeStupidDoNotRevenueMaximize (that will not respond when you call it) - suddenly thousands of product managers & engineers wonder about the magical string “stupid” in that function’s name.

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