The Adwords Usability Impossibility

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May 19th, 2008 by Geoff

In the middle of this credit crunch everyone is scrutinising every penny, least of all businesses. That does mean that that every CPC and spend on PPC is being monitored a little more closely than last year. But with the recent performance of the Adwords platform it makes this task even more difficult. How does this reflect on Google and what are Google doing about it? Read on.

Potential clients that I am talking to are complaining about the performance and the speed at which the interface is now running. I have timed it and the average loading time from the login page to an MCC is 3 minutes. With Adwords Sub MCCs within a Master MCC it makes it 6 minutes to log in, just to see the accounts! For management of accounts and prospective clients alike, the situation is very uncomfortable.

I have to say I am a fan of what Google has done, you have to take your hats off to them. I don’t think their rate of growth is a factor in all of this. In fact, I am not sure what the real cause actually is. If you compare Google Adwords to Yahoo Panama / Overture then Adwords is far superior but always put it into perspective that Google re-invented what Yahoo Overture started.

However, what can be done about issues when it does go down? Firstly, raise the issue to Google. I am sure that the more pressure you put them under from all angles the quicker it gets sorted out. Their technical team are working on the issue however after two weeks it doesn’t look good that the issue hasn’t been fixed.
Secondly, Adwords Editor is a valuable aid for managing CPCs. For any Pay Per Click account it is important that data and spend is closely monitored and Editor is a great tool for doing this.

This is very unlike Google and doesn’t reflect well on the search giant. Whenever there has been an issue with usability there has been a longer turn around than expected, normally a couple of days or so. This time seems to be somewhat different. Two weeks to fix this problem is a long time for something that is affecting all users. Why is it taking them so long and will this affect their advertising revenues? With fewer people prepared to wait for the system to load when logging in I feel CPCs will be overlooked and more money could be spent. I can’t see new advertisers being turned off by the time it takes to log in so no problem there. Therefore, overall we are looking at maybe more revenue for them through Adwords CPCs.

However, on a usability front, this doesn’t reflect well on Google, especially from a search marketing agency like us. What next will go wrong with the platform?

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