Company: Google AdWords
Entry submitted by: Akshay Nair (Akshay) Global Project Manager, AdWords Communities
Community: Google AdWords Community
https://www.ru.adwords-community.com (Russian Community)
https://www.pt.adwords-community.com (Portuguese Community)
https://www.es.adwords-community.com (Spanish Community)
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
AdWords, a flagship product of Google, accounts for the majority of the company’s revenue. Utilized by millions of businesses in over 40 languages around the world, AdWords penetration is accelerating while its features become increasingly sophisticated.
Google recognizes the opportunity to help SMBs improve their businesses through adding features that improve their advertising campaigns. AdWords customers range from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses. Our aim is to provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers and advertiser needs.
Google AdWords has leveraged the power of the Lithium platform to drive our customer education efforts on some of our fastest growing AdWords communities - Spanish (ES), Portuguese (PT) and Russian (RU). To educate our customers on AdWords and all it’s features, we use webinars (executed through the Hangouts On Air technology) and various video formats that we host on the Lithium platform. We’ve built in functionality that allows us to track the impact of our video content. This includes actions performed by our customers on their AdWords accounts after they have watched our webinars and engaged with our video content on these communities.
Our marketing program
We care immensely for our influencers and understand the value they bring to our 1:many efforts. The Google Partners Academy in the PT/ES markets and the “Boost IT” program in RU allowed us to reach and engage online marketing professionals, advance their product knowledge, educate them and share advice on how to improve their online marketing efforts.
Google Partners Academy - is a customer education program targeting Google Partners (certified AdWords agencies and certified marketing professionals). The program consists of a series of Hangouts On Air, where Google specialists (AdWords support team, account managers) guide users through a range of product-related and online marketing-related topics.
“Boost IT” - is an educational program targeting Ukrainian large advertisers from the IT sector. This program consists of a series of Hangouts On Air where account managers answer advertisers’ questions online, give presentations on product-related topics and share best practices that are relevant to our IT clients.
All discussions, questions and user conversations during and after the webinar happen on the respective communities where the Hangout On Air is hosted.
To scale our efforts further, these customer education models and initiatives were later launched in other market communities. We’ve partnered across Google with Large Client Services, Small & Medium Business Account Managers and Marketing teams based in Dublin, Wroclaw, Sao Paulo, Kiev, Buenos Aires and Mexico City to ensure we touch as many advertisers as possible. Also, we feature our Top Contributors and Rising Stars in our webinars who share their experience and insights in a live environment by answering questions in real-time.
Our results
- Community growth:
- All three communities (ES/PT/RU) doubled their size from 320k to 630k annual visits on average.
- User impact:
- We had a 232% increase in certified individuals in our Spanish speaking markets in 2014
- 29% of all actions taken by our customers who visited our 10 Communities around the world were driven by these three communities alone
- Cost savings:
- Our training efforts with the Google Partners Academy program recorded a cost saving of 91% per attendee
