Jeffrey McManus

I’m doing some marketing for Approver this week, including the press release I mentioned earlier but also some other stuff. I’ve been familiar with the Google AdWords product but I’m using it seriously for the first time to promote the site this week.

The user interface to the AdWords site leaves something to be desired. It’s slow. It’s not well organized. Some of the most important information (like whether a keyword you’ve bid on is actually displaying in search results) is buried in the user interface. And useful tools created to help you correct ineffective bids are accessed off to the side instead of integrated with the rest of the site.

AdWords is a complex product, but it’s clear that the interface wasn’t designed organically as much as it was bolted together over time. I understand how this could have happened, and I really empathize with the folks who are responsible for keeping this multi-billion dollar train running on time.

At one point, as I so often do, I threw up my hands and said "I need to hack together something that this user interface isn’t letting me do."

So I looked into using the AdWords API, but hit the brakes when I noticed that they charge for access to it. Even worse, it’s far from clear just what the charges are. (Confidential to AdWords team: what is a "quota unit"? If you’re going to set up a crazy system, define your own lexicon for it, and expect people to pay money for it, the least you could do is link to definitions and documentation.)

Setting that aside, charging for an API like this is lame. It’s like selling tickets to get in to a grocery store. You might be able to get away with it if you run the only grocery store within 500 miles, but it’s not going to win you any friends. And at the end of the day it’s self-defeating for Google — the whole point of AdWords is to capture value in exchange for business results, not tax users for creating applications that help accelerate Google’s business.

When I was at eBay we charged for the API for a few years. Defending that to developers was one of the most difficult parts of my job. The only honest defense I could offer was that charging for the API imposes a tax on usage which ensures that developers use the API efficiently. The unspoken flip side of that is "if we made it free, our servers would get the crap pounded out of them."

I suspect that imposing a tax as a blunt-force method of imposing operational efficiency in the absence of 100% stability and uptime is what’s going on with the AdWords product. But even when eBay was charging for access to the API, we still provided a way for little guys to get access for free, at least on a limited basis. AdWords doesn’t seem to do that today, which is a pity.

(eBay did make its API completely free shortly after I left, and the sky did not fall, as far as I know.)

I suspect that we haven’t heard much about the AdWords API tax since it started back in November because APIs are a sort of esoteric and mysterious thing to the folks who cover Google. There could be another reason, though: the big SEO guys (who are likely the heaviest users of the AdWords API) aren’t going to complain about this much because it has the effect of suppressing or eliminating potential competitors. Which isn’t good for Google’s business either.

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