Google recently introduced to the world, and not without a significant splash – Google Boost advertising.
It is a product primarily aimed at small businesses without the time / budget to employ someone in house or use an agency.
Basically the product is expected to strip out any of the ongoing management of a conventional Google Adwords campaign while linking to an existing Google Places account.
I don’t have any problem with this, I think that it’s great that Google is trying to innovate using Google Places (likely competition from Facebook in this market could be a reason for this?) and give businesses more opportunity to target Google users local to their service.
BUT I’m not sure whether giving the owner of the platform (Google) full power over budget is sensible or going to give the sort of relationship with web marketing that small business owners often require.
There isn’t really a great deal of information avaiable as yet about the bidding side of the process – ok the client has a set budget but no real influence on what that is being spent on. Thinking about it sensibly is it really a good thing to give the auctioneers control over the bidding in the auction. The more people involved in this process the more it will potentially harm competition and the need to drive DOWN costs. It is not really in Google’s interest to control click costs.
Yes small businesses may save money in management fees, but what sort of transparency and KPIs are these businesses going to get from a service like this? As yet I have not seen any reporting functions for Google Boost – in my opinion and I’m sure this will be shared by many Adwords advertisers – when you give Google an inch they can – perhaps 100% unintentionally – end up taking a mile. Everyone has several favourite examples of what the Google Algorithm deems ‘relevant’ for a broad match keyword!
I will reserve judgement until we hear the outcomes of the beta testing although most Google beta tests garner positive results!
