netmeg - 7:27 pm on Jul 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

Well, just consider. A year and a half ago, when I went to my seminar, it must have been obvious after a while that I was more advanced than the other 70 or so people, because I was the one asking slightly more advanced questions. At break time and lunch time, I had little clouds of people following me asking questions about AdWords - two followed me into the bathroom! I ran out of business cards by mid morning, and at one point when someone asked for my email address, I gave it and an entire row of people wrote it down. I sat down to lunch in the restaurant and we had to bring more tables around to accommodate everyone . Contrary to what you might think, it was *not* my scintillating personality that drew all this attention - these were all small businesses, usually 10 to 20 people in size - some of whom drove or flew hundreds if not thousands of miles to be there - all of whom were desperate to improve their AdWords presence, but didn't have a clue how to make it work, let alone work *well*.

If Google wants to attract these types of people in droves, they need

- more end user seminars

- better documentation written to the level of the clients, not the GAPs

- Improvements to the Budget Optimizer (options that are already *there* - they just need a switch flipped for Starter Edition!)

- Better transparency/troubleshooting help. Small businesses don't want to know about Quality Score. They want to know WHAT SPECIFICALLY they have to do to get their ads running again.

That's where I'd start, anyway. There's more could be done than that.