Google have now announced that the AdWords API Beta will attract fees.
Any bug reports are still treated as if the AdWords API was in Beta - that is, you get a massive display of indifference from Google Technical Support to any problems you report. I feel bullied and abused.
We’ve already dropped development of some innovative software that needed a reliable service. We used to support a travel company. The travel industry have offers that may be introduced over a period of hours and have a lifetime of a day or two. You need some smart techniques to get the offer advertised at the right price, at the right time. Even a few hours delay in putting up the advert or changing a bid can have consequences in the thousands of dollars range. Reliable automation could do that, and we were able to do this in 2005. However, as the Beta has aged, the reliability had dropped and we’ve withdrawn our fast-paced automated bidding services.
We’re now backing further and further away from using the AdWords API. The latest iteration of our software needed only regular reports from AdWords. We now can’t get those from the system reliably, so we’re having to manually download reports, as it is more reliable and timely than the failing API.
Typical Costs and Usage
Let’s take a typical usage of the AdWords API (as we use it - can’t answer for other developers).
For fast paced bidding, and budget control, we want to download reports every hour at most. Ideally, we’d download them every 15 minutes (Google’s reporting system updates the statistics no more than every 15 minutes), but we’ve never been able to get them reliably at that pace.
We haven’t found a way to get all the stats we want in a single report via the API, so we have to run two reports per hour, each no more than a few MB in size (they grow through the day, but that’s Google’s choice as they want to deliver aggregated reports) and a few supplementary reports on a daily or weekly basis.
That’s 2,000 quota operations an hour, or $0.50 to get one round of bidding and budget management data. Every hour. So that’s typically about $12 a day or $360 a month. For $360 a month, I can buy a moderately good performance web server, and a database server, and colocate them. Enough performance to, for example, host a few dozen web sites for SME’s, without any visible strain.
So the scale of Google’s fees for running the reports considerably exceeds the likely computational burden. And that’s only so we can know what Google is doing with the money we’ve given them to advertise. Remember that they also take a fee for each advert that someone clicks on. And you get the reports for free if you submit them by hand even if they email the report to a piece of automation that then works exactly as if the report had been submitted by the API…
Advertiser Abuse
I think that Google really doesn’t care about advertisers. The paid search market is hot enough and filled with enough irrational bidders that Google will make a fortune, every day, for years to come. Leaves a bad taste in the mouth when you deal with people who take your money and don’t deliver a value added service, though. I want them to fail; I want to find a competitor who’ll behave better. Great job Google - I’ve gone from being a gentle advocate to becoming a strident critic in less than a year…
Jeff wrote,
I’ve only recently gotten into Adwords, but ran across your blog because I am already feeling the same way. I haven’t even come close to considering using their API, as it seems to me that they can’t even get their advertiser’s interface to work. The “active” compaign/keyword status seems to be the most deceiving part of it, and it is widely published on the net to be a headache, and yet they have not done anything to fix the problem.
I think that at this point, they are just trying to attract new advertisers so they can leach our keywords and add them to their keyword tool…They’re probably using to somehow make Google search smarter, as well.
Have you found a good alternative yet? I was looking at AdBrite, but its a different animal (differently delivery).
Link | November 8th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Hi Jeff, thanks for the comment.
Alternatives? Try MSN AdCenter and Yahoo!Search Marketing (but only if you get the Panama interface). Don’t use anything else without a decent click fraud detection and reporting system. You are reasonably safe from click fraud on Google, Y!SM and MSN AdCenter if you stick to keyword search. Avoid contextual search without a good click identification system.
The “Active” thing - it was an attempt to simplify a previously more complex field that included information about why the adverts weren’t running. Users found the plethora of reasons confusing, it seems. So it was turned into “active/inactive”. But that disguises a host of internal states that “active” represents and also a bunch of different reasons that “inactive” represents. We’ve become quite good at interpreting what Google means, by looking at the other signs and signals. The value of the MinCPC tells you meaningful information, for example. They just don’t document it.
Link | November 9th, 2006 at 9:57 am