I had two pretty interesting experiences with AdWords today that left me convinced that Google knows that at some point service will help differentiate their services. On two different MCCs (and yes, it's for two different companies so it had to be that way), I had Google folk go the extra mile or show that the organization was being responsive. I am impressed because even though my spend has steadily climbed over the years, I'm still not a massive customer. Let's call the number in the high five figures per year for them, and leave it at that.

I first called today after another contested ad I was running was shot down during the review process. The entire issue boils down to the use of a term that is protected in Canada and Australia, but is not protected in the U.S. Using that term in your ad is like advertising for Big Pharma. Without a special exemption, you get that big Pepto-colored box that essentially says,

"Tell us, oh unworthy, why thou shouldst be permitted to do this."

The exact words aren't important. What is important is that these reviews sometimes take days -- which is a killer if you have just written some cool topical creative that will be stale in days.

Surprise.

I booted up this morning to find an email telling me that my ad was still unworthy. I called, punched in my numbers and got connected to a friendly person (not unusual, they're all usually pretty friendly since, you know, we give them money). She promised an email response. I went to a status meeting on traffic. When I came back a short while later, there was an email from the same person, with an apology and a promise to note our account that we are permitted to use this term when we geo-target in the US.

That is really proactive, slick service. I was impressed.

Later in the day, I got a call from a number with a masked caller id. I usually let them fall to voice mail, but I had a minute so I grabbed the line. The caller was someone supposedly from Google. Maybe they were calling from an outsourced center, but they sure sounded like they knew what they were talking about.

Had I heard about the bug in Google's testing module, the so called "Optimizer"? This is the one where you can test a gazillion permutations of a landing page, not the somewhat sketchy campaign-level optimizer that proposes expensive keywords and silly total spends.

Why, yes, I had.

Well, they were calling to make sure that my three pages with those tests (paused and/or deleted) were removed. Actually, they proposed using a fix on your landing pages if the experiment was still running. Mine were dead, parked in an orphaned alley and not indexed. Didn't matter. They should come off the server.

What impressed me most was that the caller didn't ask me to do anything but go to my Google account on my own and read along with him. I assured him I knew about the issues and would either modify the script, or more likely, just kill the pages since they didn't perform well enough to stay live.

That's pretty cool service twice in one day from the company we love to criticize. Two different accounts, two different problems, two immediate solutions with proactive offers to help.

Sounds like that big company might have learned a thing or two about customer service along the way.