Slicecast

Adwords Editor Beta UI (click to view)On the 24th January t
he first publicly available version of AdWords Editor Beta was released to a limited group of beta testers, of which I am not one!

This looks like an interesting application, though its hard to see what the target audience would want to do with the tool. Larger agencies / clients who are running bid management software (such as the great Atlas Search) would find this very lightweight, yet for SME's it may not quite do enough. I suspect that as a first beta Google will be testing basic functionality, and that later releases (if it even goes beyond beta) may offer bid management facilities.

It's a potentially smart move by Google to attract more smaller advertisers who don't have budgets to run a bid manager but who want to do much more with their search - in other words, if Google provides its own bid manager then its got a better chance of retaining higher %ages of smaller advertisers budgets. This of course is pure speculation - there is no indication that this product will ever offer bid facilities.

In any case it's a nice looking application, even if I can't see an obvious need for it! However, in terms of competition maybe it could compete directly with the SME targeted Atlas Onepoint - which at a starting cost of $79.95 per month is an ideal solution for SME - that is until a free solution is offered by Google?

So, I'm digressing by talking about SME - but since I can't review the Adwords editor I need to make a point. This point is that for anyone working in search, there is one market that is generally untapped for agencies and that is SME. The reason agencies don't target SME is that the payback in terms of effort/fees is unlikely to make much economic sense. However SMEs represent the long tail of search customers - hundreds of thousands of businesses spending a few hundred dollars per month adds up to a market. A challenge for SEMs and agencies is to find a solution where consulting skills are offered to marry with automated process tools that ensure search is done as effectively as possible. Quite a big challenge, but one that I know is being addressed by some of the larger SEMs...