Google Adwords Vouchers – stop waving that money in front of me and then taking it away!

Imagine going into your local shop and being handed a €50 voucher at the door, imagine how happy you’d be.

Now imagine going to the counter and being told you can’t pay with it because you’re a regular. Not so happy now I’d say. In fact, on the wrong day it could even make you irate.

And yet this is what Google seem to be doing a lot lately with their Adwords vouchers. They are clearly trying to encourage new users by giving vouchers to new accounts, however they are also sending them to a lot of existing customers who then can’t use them (unless you sneakily set up a separate account, but that could also mess with your metrics and analysis).

In the case of your local shop it could be dangerous, because there is generally another shop nearby that you could patronise instead, however in the case of Google Adwords is there any real competition?

Should Google be concerned about the negative emotional fallout from giving unusable vouchers to their customers?

It’s a question that can’t really be answered, but I wonder what the cost / gain there would be to at least having a lesser option for existing customers – instead of simply being told your account is too old to redeem the voucher imagine seeing this message:

Oh dear – we’re sorry but you can’t redeem this voucher, it’s for new users only. We love you too though, because you’ve been a customer since ‹insert date›, so here’s a tenner added to your existing balance

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.