14 DAY TRIAL // Google's AdWords advertising platform has been the cornerstone of its business and to this day 97 percent of Google's revenue comes from advertising. The company pretty much turned search advertising into a legitimate business model and now dominates the market. Even so, as Google's CEO Eric Schmidt recently pointed out, a tech company that stops growing dies. So Google is experimenting with new ad products aimed at markets that may not have traditionally considered search ads and is now trying to lure small local businesses with a flat rate search advertising product, as AdAge found.
Currently Google uses a keyword bidding system to determine which ads to serve in its search engine. This has several advantages as the system is very flexible in terms of how much an advertiser spends and where his ads show up. If understood and used properly it has a lot of potential but the problem is that it's a rather complicated system and deploying it can be a more complex task.
"When we talk to small businesses, they don't always want to know what an auction is, how to create an ad, or bid on keywords, it's complicated, so our goal has been to, 'How can we make this really simple for them where they just pay a flat fee per month,'" Susan Wojcicki, Google VP of product management, said. So Google set out to come up with a product that was easy to understand and deploy and which could prove interesting to local businesses that otherwise might not even have a website set up. The new model does away with the bidding and instead just requires a fixed monthly fee.
But Google is also offering an interesting option to the small businesses; the ads can feature a Google Voice phone number that will be associated with the business. When a customer uses the number provided by Google the businesses get a "This call brought to you by Google" notification allowing them to track the performance of their ads. The new ad options are now live in San Francisco and San Diego and Google is waiting to see how it fares before rolling it out in other cities.