How will Google manage growing demand for support for its free products, as people rely more and more on its services?
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)If you rely on a compelling service that happens to be free, what level of customer support are you entitled to receive?
Google is trying to figure that out. Known for using brilliant engineers, complex algorithms and speedy servers to organize online information in a simple and accessible fashion, Google is learning how to add the human touch to its repertoire as customers look for answers that can't be found on an FAQ.
Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with the results. Some advertisers have been complaining about Google's Web-page-first approach to customer service issues for years, with the most common gripe that they find it exceedingly difficult to reach a real live human being when they have a problem that isn't answered on a product Web page. More recently, Katie Braband, who reported problems with Google Checkout's handling of transactions at her company, Datto, was just as frustrated by Google's response to her issues as she was the issues themselves. "The only e-mails we've received response to are pre-generated, it's very clear there's no person writing the e-mail," she said in September.
Google is aware that customer service will play a large role in its growth as it offers more paid services, and seems committed to improving services for those kinds of customers over time. "The first thing a CIO is going to say is, 'where is that person and how do I wring their neck?'" said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview earlier this year. Schmidt knows a thing or two about traditional enterprise customer service: he ran corporate software maker Novell before joining Google. And before Novell, he was an executive at Sun Microsystems.
For many users of Google's free services, support is limited to a series of Web pages, FAQs, and user forums. That's not that surprising, since Google can't realistically offer phone support to every Gmail user who can't figure out the conversation-based design.
But as Google continues to push forward with free advertising-supported services that people and small businesses increasingly rely on in their personal and professional lives, the company appears to be banking on its ability to train those users to expect a healthy dose of relatively low-cost support. Web pages with hints, troubleshooting tips, and discussion forums are the first level of support across virtually all of Google's products and are pretty much the end of the line for those who do not pay to use products or services. That's not unusual in technology; even businesses that charge customers for their products have moved in that direction in a bid to cut support costs.
When it comes to Google's main profit engine--the AdWords search keyword ads--there are two basic kinds of customer service, said Deanna Yick, a Google representative. High-roller customers enjoy access to a personal sales team they can reach out and call, but almost everyone else relies on Web-based resources like the AdWords Help Center.
For a while, Google also offered phone support to a proportion of those advertisers without sales team connections. However, it recently reduced the amount of phone support it provides for those not supported by the sales team, leaving e-mail as the sole contact method for a larger segment (Google won't say exactly how many) of its most important customers.
"AdWords is an effective, self-service online advertising platform for advertisers of all sizes worldwide," Google said in a statement regarding the reduction in phone support. "Some clients work with our sales teams, while others prefer to manage their accounts independently. We also provide email and phone support to some advertisers, and have worked hard to build out a robust set of online resources (such as the AdWords Help Center, AdWords Learning Center and user forums) to help advertisers find the answers to their questions around the clock wherever they might be located."
Is this an issue? Google argues that in many cases e-mail and Web support can be faster than sitting on hold waiting for the next customer service representative to answer your call in the order in which it was received. The company can track the most common queries and therefore answer the most commonly asked questions on the Web much more quickly than a telephone-based system would allow, while also developing fixes for commonly reported problems as to cut down on the need for support in the first place.
But on the Google Apps side of the world, the company knows it doesn't have the luxury of pulling back on phone support with its most important customers, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise.
Here, as well, Google tries to encourage its users to solve their issues through forums and troubleshooting pages. It turns to the solution Google employs for just about everything--an algorithm--to get the most relevant information regarding support issues on those pages and before the people who need detailed answers, and fast.
But Google Apps Premium users--who pay $50 a year per user--can also talk to live Google support personnel anytime day or night when they encounter issues. Years of phone-based IT support has trained system administrators and IT executives to expect the human touch when it comes to advanced support, Glotzbach said, echoing Schmidt's comments last month.
Glotzbach--like any true Googler--believes there are efficiencies just waiting to be discovered that could be greatly improve the customer support experience for both Google and its customers.
"I think this is a fascinating technology and innovation challenge that's properly underappreciated as such," Glotzbach said. "When people think of support, they think of large call centers. But underneath that there is a massive opportunity to innovate." Left unmentioned were the cost savings that accompany automated support.
With innovation comes friction, however, as new ways of thinking about old problems grate on the status quo.
Google is pushing into a whole host of businesses in which it is a newcomer, such as Google Apps, Google Voice, and now Google Maps Navigation. In many cases, those products are free, which reduces expectations for premium support (usually). But those products compete against paid products and services that do provide some level of support.
As more and more people rely on these free services--and Google crowds out competitors who can't compete with free--support issues will grow. Even products that "just work" fail from time to time, and those failures present opportunities for companies to build loyalty if they handle the support encounter the right way, and resentment if they don't.
Can Google train those customers to expect a passive Web-based support experience? Or will Google's free strategy evolve into two groups, those willing to tolerate passive support for free, and those willing to pay a little extra for more service?
Either way, managing the customer experience has been a relatively easy task for Google up until now; basic search requires little customer support. It's about to get a lot more difficult.
Google is testing a new ad format that could shake up the familiar look and feel of a Google search page.
A select group of Google advertisers in the U.S. is being given the opportunity to try out so-called "product ads" that will let them put an awful lot more information in their ad than fits inside the current text-ad boxes on Google search pages. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Google has confirmed the testing, which won't replace text ads but could allow Google to test the effectiveness of a different bidding system for advertisers.
Unlike standard ads, advertisers in this program will bid on the commission they wish to pay Google for actual sales that occur on the advertiser's Web site, rather than what they want to pay when a potential customer clicks on that ad. The ads will be submitted in the same way companies submit free listings to Google Product Search or Google Shopping through Google Base, but unlike those listings Google says it will provide "prominent placements" for ads submitted through this program.
Google Blogoscoped has the full e-mail sent to potential advertisers, which identifies the program as a "beta" and describes the ads as such: "Google product ads will feature product specific information directly in the ad such as price and product image. During the beta program, Google will be testing to identify the most effective ad formats."
A Google representative did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Google's love-hate relationship with the advertisers that pay its bills could hit another rocky patch following its latest AdWords policy change.
Google announced Thursday night that starting next month it would begin allowing certain companies to purchase advertisements that use trademarks--even ones they don't own--in the text of their ads on Google search results. Previously, Google hadn't allowed anyone but the trademark owner to use a trademark in the text of an ad, but the search giant reversed course, saying "we believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S."
But the move could anger companies who are already sensitive about the use of their trademarks as keyword triggers in searches, the subject of two lawsuits pending against Google. According to an industry group called the Alliance Against Bait and Click, which includes companies such as 1-800 Contacts and Starwood Hotels, "this (policy change) further exposes the self-interest guiding Google's advertising policies, which permits dishonest marketers to mislead consumers," it said in a statement.
In some ways, the decision makes an awful lot of sense. Some third-party resellers, for example, were not allowed to use the trademark for goods they were authorized to sell in their Google ads if the trademark holder objected.
Google compared the policy shift to turning its ads into the online equivalent of a grocery store ad circular in a Sunday newspaper, where no one raises a trademark eyebrow if Safeway advertises a sale on 12-packs of Coca-Cola. Google said it would limit the use of trademarks in text ads to three types of companies: resellers, component sellers (buy memory for Hewlett-Packard laptops here!), and information providers.
That brings Google's policies in line with those of Yahoo, which allows trademarks to be used in text ads with similar restrictions. In the past, advertisers have been more willing to sue Google over trademark disputes because the search giant said it wouldn't allow trademarks in the text of ads, but such trademarks would appear anyway from time to time on certain ads, said Dave Kelly, a trademark lawyer with Finnegan.
"This policy is better than what they were doing before," Kelly said. "This means there is an editorial policy and the number of misleading ads should be smaller than under their policy before."
Still some groups, such as the Alliance Against Bait and Click, believe it's possible that the move could grant deceptive advertisers looking to trick searchers onto click farms or e-mail harvesting sites an additional weapon to deploy.
For example, a company could theoretically sell just a single iPhone case on its Web site, advertise under searches for "iPhone cases," and redirect ad clicks to sites that mostly sell competitive smartphones or consumer electronics gadgets. Or, it could force a visitor to provide his or her e-mail for more information before revealing that flashy iPhone case.
More money
What's more likely, however, is that companies interested in preserving their brands could be forced to pay more in Google's ad auction process to make sure their legitimate ads appear on those searches.
Winning Google's keyword auction process involves a combination of the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay per click as well as an ad quality score. Without the ability to use a trademark in the text of their ads, third-party retailers were forced to write generic ads that likely didn't see as high a click-through rate as ads with the trademark, hurting their quality score.
But if the playing field is leveled on the quality score side of the equation, then the maximum bid has to go up. AdAge reported that branded advertisers now feel they'll have to increase the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click in order to ensure ads with their trademark appear above ads from companies that don't own that trademark.
Financial analysts who follow Google agree. "Advertisers will likely bid more if the ad can have product names and brands that will help drive CTR (click-through rate) conversions," said Ben Schachter of Broadpoint AmTech in a research note Friday. Combined with Google's announcement last week that advertisers in many parts of the world can now bid on keywords that involve trademarks, Schachter said "these two changes will be positive revenue drivers when allowed and into 3Q and beyond, however, we believe trademark holders will undoubtedly, and loudly, raise legal challenges."
Kelly, who has followed issues with Google and trademarks very closely for years, isn't so sure.
"Although the updated policy may not affect those trademark owners who want to sue Google simply because they object to the act of Google selling their trademarks as keywords, it should reduce the amount of litigation over the appearance of Google's keyword-triggered sponsored ads," he said. That's because Google is now responsible for reviewing the content of the ads to make sure trademarks are being used properly.
In what is likely not a coincidence, the decision comes following a quarter in which Google's cost-per-click numbers (the average cost that advertisers are willing to pay for a click) fell for the second-straight quarter while overall click-through rates remained flat. Issues around Google's trademark policies on search keywords have also heated up in recent weeks, with an appeals court's decision to reinstate the Rescuecom case and a new lawsuit filed this week over Google's practice of allowing anyone to bid on search keywords containing trademarks.
Some of Google's partners will hate this decision, and some, such as retailers, will like it. Either way, Google should benefit from the sale of more relevant--and more expensive--advertising.
Should companies be allowed to serve ads based on keywords that are trademarks of competitors?
(Credit: Firepond)About a month after an appeals court revived a trademark lawsuit over Google's keyword sales, another suit has surfaced in Texas.
Ars Technica spotted Firepond's lawsuit, filed Monday in Texas, against Google over whether Google should be allowed to sell keywords bearing a company's trademark to its competitors. A similar suit involving PC support company Rescuecom was brought back to life in April by an appeals court after initially being dismissed in 2006.
The issue is whether Coke, for example, should be allowed to buy keywords such as Pepsi and place ads for Coke products on searches for Pepsi. Rescuecom and Firepond argue that their respective keywords are an extension of the trademark they have acquired on their brands, and that Google should not be encouraging competitors to violate that trademark by using it to promote their own products. Firepond makes sales management software.
Google is willing to remove a trademark from one of its ads if it's in the text of the ad (Pepsi sucks! Try Coke!), but "we will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint," the company says in an FAQ about its trademark policies for AdWords. Its reasoning?
"Accordingly, our trademark policy not to monitor the use of trademarks in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Ireland aims to provide users with choices relevant to their keywords. At the same time, we investigate trademark violations in ad text both as a courtesy to the trademark owner and to ensure that ads are clear to users." A Google representative declined to comment on the Firepond lawsuit itself, saying the company was still reviewing the complaint.
AdWords is the engine that has made many a Googler rich. The system allows anyone to bid on a given keyword and win placement on the top or right side of a search results page based on a combination of factors such as the size of the maximum bid for that keyword as well as the quality of the ad.
Part of the reason that this system generates the revenue it does is because the results are highly visible; much to the chagrin of a company outbid or outclassed by a competitor for a keyword pertinent to their business. In 2006, Rescuecom tried to make the further argument that not only is this aggravating, it's misleading to consumers who think they are going to learn more about Rescuecom's services when they search for Rescuecom, only to learn about the competition instead if they click on an ad generated by that search. The company will get the chance to make that argument again in the coming months after its suit in New York State was revived by a judge.
For now, the practice continues in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Ireland. But Google has a very different policy in most of the European Union, reaffirming its intention to uphold complaints of the use of trademarks in keywords in prominent EU countries such as France and Germany when it announced an expansion of its trademark policy earlier this month.
Shazam, a mobile music discovery service for the iPhone, T-Mobile G1, and other devices, announced Friday that it has added 20 million users since September and now has 35 million users worldwide.
Shazam's success is due in part to its availability. According to the company, its app can be found on phones offered by 75 carriers across 60 countries. Shazam users are tagging an average of 10 tracks per month, and the company claims that a total of 1 million tracks are being tagged monthly around the world. By the end of 2009, CEO Andrew Fisher expects the app to have 50 million users worldwide.
Netflix announced Thursday that it has signed up more than 600,000 subscribers since January 1, bringing its total to 10 million subscribers. Incredibly, 1 million Xbox 360 owners activated Netflix streaming accounts in the past three months alone. The company expects 10.6 million to 11.3 million subscribers by the end of the year.
Google Maps now features real-time traffic for Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse, France. The app also features real-time traffic updates across French motorways, Google says. Google Maps for U.S. customers currently offers real-time traffic nationwide as well.
Where 2 Get It, a company that provides local search for national brands, has been named to the Google AdWords Authorized Reseller program. According to Where 2 Get It, it will "deliver the power of Google AdWords to (its) clients." The company's clients include more than 550 national and regional brand manufacturers, along with retailers and franchises.
One True Media, the parent company of an online video ad creator called SpotMixer, has announced a fresh $9 million in Series B venture funding. The round was led by DAG Ventures, with contributions from NTT Finance and existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Amid widespread financial difficulties (to say the least) in the media business, SpotMixer and its new investors are pitching it as a cost-cutting option for small companies.
"While the market opportunity for video advertising remains well-defined, smaller businesses are more concerned than ever about how to most cost-effectively spend their limited advertising dollars," said DAG managing director Young Chung, who has joined One True Media's board of directors. "SpotMixer has quickly established itself as one of the most innovative and thoughtful solutions that will enable accelerated growth around this major advertising trend."
In conjunction, SpotMixer announced that it has been appointed the first official "authorized reseller" of Google's AdWords service for videos. This means that SpotMixer clients will be able to directly distribute their ads using Google's ad platform in addition to creating them online.
SpotMixer charges clients a minimum of $49 per month for access to its online tools, which are effectively a souped-up version of the many Web-based video "mixing" services out there. Then they can shoot them out across the Web with video embed codes or ad campaigns on the Web or cable TV.
Making the advertising process cheaper and easier is certainly a good pitch during a recession, but there's a flip side, too: Small companies with tightening budgets could easily opt to nix video ads altogether, sticking with the more familiar territory of text or display advertising. SpotMixer, on the other hand, maintains that video ads are more effective
Google has begun testing ads that accompany the suggestions that appear when people begin typing in a search query.
Google Suggest is a feature that provides a drop-down listing possible search terms; I find it handy for completing long queries with the down arrow and the Enter key. With some people, though, Google is testing a green search ad at the top of the list, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land reported.
The text ads that appear above or to the right of search results happen to be Google's massive profit engine, but the company also said its tests show they improve people's search experience overall. It's not clear whether that will prove to be the case for search ads that appear in Google Suggest, but Google has been adding all sorts of ways to make more money from its site.
I use Google's search page less and less now that I've begun using Chrome, whose address bar leads directly is a Google search box. Has anyone seen search ads showing in Chrome's search results suggestion drop-down?
Magnify360, a company specializing in advertising conversion optimization, announced on Thursday that it has launched Google Cost Optimizer for those that want to maximize the performance of their Google AdWords campaigns.
According to the company, Google Cost Optimizer synchronizes with its clients' AdWords accounts in real time and responds to bid, keyword, and campaign changes without a hitch. By doing so, the tool lets Magnify360's clients gain return-on-investment information in real time on metrics such as cost per click, revenue per click, conversation rate, and overall return on investment.
"In order for businesses to survive this recession, marketing must be more efficient," said Olivier Chaine, chief executive and founder of Magnify360. "We built Google Cost Optimizer so that our search-marketing clients can quickly and easily optimize every single penny."
The company claims that more iterations of the tool will be available this quarter for other advertising services, including those of Yahoo, Microsoft, and ValueClick, but for now, it's focusing its attention on AdWords integration.
Magnify360's Google Cost Optimizer focuses on real-time updates to differentiate itself in the market, but with so many search ad specialists already working to optimize companies' AdWords integration, it may be tough for it to gain a foothold in the space.
Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.
For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would've otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.
With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map" it's most popular, and what the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are.
Results can also be filtered by geographic region, time frame, or category. Let's say you search for "spears," and most of the results on Google Insights for Search deal with some trashy pop star. But you happen to be the owner of a small business that creates replica medieval weapons, so that's not the sort of spears you're looking for. You can narrow your search down to a single field--"industries," say, or "recreation," and hope you see fewer instances of Britney and Jamie Lynn.
Here's another one: search for "spaghetti," and you'll get a lot of results about people seeking recipes. But narrow it down to the "lifestyles" category, and you'll see that most of the search results that Google Insights provides involve the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Google Analytics relaunched today, adding several new visualization tools and ways to share data with others. The tool gives Web site owners a free and relatively easy system to keep track of how people are accessing content on their site, including ways to track which content is getting the most views, how much time each user is spending on the site, and the number of visits by time of day. There's also a handy map overlay which will show you where your users are, right down to the city they live in.
No it's not an episode of Jericho, it's site usage by geography.
(Credit: CNET Networks)One of the updated features is the Analytics dashboard, which is now completely customizable and has simplified data. Users can relocate, add, and remove the various data widgets, in a similar fashion to that of iGoogle. Also new is the option to e-mail or export reports as PDFs, which can now be scheduled to be sent out automatically every day, week, month or quarter using a built-in calendar. Previously you were only able to export it as a non-human-friendly XML file.
The service is mainly an extension of Google's AdWords program, which lets site owners purchase words that link to various parts of their site via contextual ads that show up on Google or partnered search engine results. But even if you're not interested in making money it's a free Analytics solution that requires no software, just a line of code on any page you want to keep track of. If you're a WordPress user, there's even a plug-in to automatically add it to your site. Blogger users are also able to add it by tweaking their blog template.
There's more information about the update on the Google Analytics Blog post. For more screenshots of the new dashboard, keep reading.
This is Google Analytic's new dashboard. Each stat box is its own widget, and can be moved around or closed ad-hoc.
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