Google AdWords: Bad for Business?
About 4 years ago, we started “buying keywords” on Google. This was before the profusion of Search Engine Marketing / Optimization firms and before the prices for competitive keywords skyrocketed to their present stratospheric levels. At the time, it was already pretty obvious that Google was the search engine of choice for business users and the small set of keywords appropriate to our business could all be acquired at a reasonable average cost. Plus, we only paid for actual clicks to our site and we were able to limit our monthly budget to whatever we felt comfortable with. Frankly, at the time it seemed like a no-brainer. And, in fact, although the actual number of “closed” projects originating with Google was small, our overall spend on Google was minimal enough that the ROI was quite positive.
Since then, many other UI Design / Usability shops have discovered that search marketing is a good lead generator for our type of business, and we now find ourselves regularly sharing the Google right-hand margin with the same group of firms (generally speaking). One natural consequence of this is that prices for the keywords we buy have increased dramatically — which is fine, the law of supply and demand being one that we all have to live with in one way or another. More recently, however, we’ve discovered another effect about which we are less sanguine…
It seems that AdWords has made it very easy (too easy?) for prospective clients to pull together a fairly long list of prospective UI / Usability vendors to consider for a new project. A search or two, a few clicks around the vendor sites just to validate their services and credentials on a general level, and voila! Eight apparently appropriate firms, all of which are eager to do business with you and just waiting for you to get in touch. A quick email to all eight and the proposals come rolling in!
While this may seem like a tremendous convenience for clients (and a good result for the bidding firms), the problem with this scenario is that the sheer number of bidders forces most clients to commoditize the project in order to facilitate the mass communication. It quickly becomes impractical to maintain (or even initiate) any level of direct — i.e. non-email — communication with individual vendors without unfairly prejudicing the others. The result is a set of highly regimented and formal communication exchanges in which many of the most important qualities of the prospective vendors are suppressed. I believe that this can lead to a bad result for the client who has not had the opportunity to “listen” to each vendor explain their process and experience in their own words and at their own pace.
I’m all in favor of healthy competition, but our experience has taught us that clients who spend time (in person or on the phone) getting to know who we are and what we do are very likely to hire us. And this is just not possible when 8 other firms are in the mix. Google AdWords seems to encourage this phenomenon and it represents (in my view) a missed opportunity both for us and for the prospective client.
August 30th, 2005 at 9:35 am
I read your article in Digital Web. Very nicely written, and probably one of the easiest article to understand on that site.
Anyway, I also agree with your blog post. AdWords for us resulted modest increase of email RFPs with our address in CC field. At first, we were happy to oblige to this crapshoot invitation. But after watching our budget drain from indiscriminate clicks that were costing us $5 a pop, we had had it. We got tired of being screened out for all the wrong reasons. More insulting was the fact that most of the competing firms that advertised on AdWords provided atrocious template based designs at low cost.
Then it dawned on us that that’s what the market demand. Cheap web sites. After about a year of trial, we puled all our Overture and Google keyword based campaigns.