Google is changing the name of its iconic Adwords advertising service.
For those nostalgic about the old days of online advertising, we’re almost at the end of an era.
Google Adwords is rebranding its service as merely Google Ads in the coming weeks.
The rebranding makes sense. Adwords started out as an ad program made up of only text ads but has grown to include display ads, video ads and more.
Still, I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic. I was an early advertiser with the pioneer in text ads, GoTo, which later became Overture and was then acquired by Yahoo. Adwords was Google’s answer to GoTo.
I remember placing ads on the system in the early days when you had to bid on a CPM basis rather than clicks.
While Adwords has changed a lot over the years, one thing that hasn’t changed is its moniker.
Until now.
Joseph Peterson says
Better name. Simple.
Green Jobs says
Agreed, AdWords always confused normal people.
Ian Ingram says
I believe it was GoTo which gave identical search volume for keywords that were reversed for some time, may have been Overture though. Can’t imagine the number of backwards domains that were registered as a result. Then the resulting spam which came from those who actually believed those numbers, offering domains like EstateReal.org “it has 3,000,000 exact match searches per month in Google alone and I’m offering it to you for 1/2 of what realestate.com would sell for…”
Nuno says
I was a beta-tester for Google Adwords, NDA and all, seems a lifetime ago.