“Press Release, Jun 20, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Dex One Corporation and Google announced today a strategic agreement that will elevate Dex One to a select group of companies around the world who serve as Google AdWords(TM) Certified Partners. This partnership is part of Dex One’s overall efforts to drive the company’s digital sales to 30 percent of total revenue by the end of 2012.
Through the partnership, Dex One customers will be better positioned to optimize their lead generation activities, leverage local search, enhance their digital presence and better compete in a changing marketplace.”
This is most impressive sounding. Dex One desperately needs to gain a competitive edge in the ad products they can offer small businesses. Google is the biggest online ad seller of them all. Dex One has just become one of Google’s key strategic ad sales partners. That sure sounds like a deal that will lead to “a marked competitive edge”. What extensive requirements need to be met to become an elite Google AdWords Certified partner? Manage millions of dollars of ad spend? Have offices in 50 countries? According to Google:
- Have managed at least a US $10,000 spend over 90 days (to be counted from the day the AdWords account is linked to the MCC). The MCC account linked to the company must have spend on 60 days out of a 90-day period.
- Have at least one individually qualified employee
- Note our terms and conditions
So how many companies are in this “select group of companies”? At least 720 in the US and 1240 if we count international agencies that service US clients.
The fact is Dex still sends click traffic to landing pages on the dexknows.com domain, and not the clients business website. The technology that Dex will use is the same technology Google provides to all adwords clients around optimization. Training to local sales reps in the field will be helpful, however, that sales representative will not be certified, nor will they develop the adwords campaign.
I expect that my previous dexknows post will remain the same.