Ask the guy at your local dry cleaners or mechanic shop or bakery how he gets the most out of Google AdWords. Odds are he’ll give you a sideways look and ask, “Google Ad-whats?”
When it launched 11 years ago, Google’s AdWords was a straightforward product. Advertisers could buy search terms, and Google would display small ads every time someone searched for those words. It was a lot like the classifieds.
Today, AdWords generates the vast majority of Google’s revenue. But it’s also become incredibly complex to use. A whole “search engine marketing” consulting industry has emerged just to help AdWords customers make the right choices on which keywords to buy and how much to bid.
That’s why last summer, Google launched a “lite” version of AdWords called “AdWords Express,” that’s both easier to understand and faster to use. And last spring, it introduced free phone support to help AdWords customers learn to use the product. That service is now available in about 70 countries around the world.
“We are making it a priority now to ensure small businesses are successful,” Francoise Brougher, Google vice president of global SMB sales and operations, tells Fast Company.
The moves are part of a larger effort at Google to make itself attractive to the kinds of organizations that in previous years would have fallen through the cracks, the types of small businesses–usually local ones, like mechanics and dry cleaners–whose owners have neither the time to learn how to use AdWords themselves nor the money to pay consultants to run campaigns for them.
