Every day – or as much as I can make it so – I Tweet an AdWords Help Forum Weather Report. What does it mean? The AdWords Help Forum is a user to user – or advertiser to advertiser – help forum. Apart from the advertisers, there are a few Google staffers who spend some of their time there, mostly because they facilitate discussion. Sometimes they will provide a connection to Google Customer Service, but the forum is not intended as a replacement for Google Customer Service.
There are various ways for users to ask Google Customer Service for assistance. By and large, if those systems fail, then users are given a message to ask on the AdWords Help Forum.
I count how many questions are really Google Internal Status questions. Questions that should have been directed to customer service, but have wound up in a user to user forum, where the users do not have access to account specific information for another advertiser. I then express that question count as a percentage.
A Weather Report of 40% means that forty in one hundred of the most recent threads are judged, by me, as requiring a piece of information that only Google can answer. A question that I can’t touch other than to give reassuring messages.
At this point, you may be wondering why I bother. I like solving problems. AdWords is my crossword puzzle. I used to be a lecturer – a University educator and researcher, roughly equivalent to a US Professor – and I still like mentoring or tutoring. So if people ask questions I can answer, and especially if I can deliver a short answer to provoke some thinking, I’m a happier bunny. I don’t get (many) leads this way. Given that I’ve posted several thousand responses, the handful of mostly low value and short period clients isn’t a financial justification. OTOH, I think I can probably troubleshoot an AdWords account in less time than almost anyone on the planet… That’s why I do it. The fun of looking at 200 newly posted questions and going – “yeah”, “yup”, “easy”, “know it”, “yeah”… And I’m genuinely delighted when someone asks something that I don’t instantly have an answer for.
The “Weather Report” is really a count of the questions that are uninteresting for me; questions where the answer is obvious if you work for Google and have access to the AdWords management tools, and not obvious if you don’t :)
If you want to see my assessment of how well Google is directing users to appropriate resources, follow me on Twitter as JezChatfield.
Richard Ball wrote,
FWIW, reading your weather reports is now a part of my morning routine. ;-)
Link | June 9th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Gee, thanks, Rich! How can I make it more useful for you, or is it just a barometer – lets you know what the weather is like?
Link | June 10th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Richard Ball wrote,
It’s good as is – let’s me know whether or not it’s worth wading into the forum on a given day.
Link | June 12th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
I’m going to experiment with a small change. Instead of repeatedly reciting that the Customer Service Questions revolve around the usual suspects, I’ll try to additionally count questions that appear to be more than Quality Score Collapse and Display URL For Affiliates. That’ll mostly be questions about analytics, geotargeting, and the rare question about how the auction really works, etc.
Link | June 15th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Traffic secrets wrote,
A weather report for Adwords. Now thats a nice concept and really its what the web was designed for. The sharing of information.
Its nice to know that there is an alternative to the long wait for Google CS. I now have acces to this
” weather map”
Thanks.
Kevin
Link | November 5th, 2009 at 8:41 pm