I was wondering what the difference between an Adwords reseller and a Adwords Qualified Company was? Is there any benefit in getting a reseller to manage your PPC over a qualified company or vice versa?
there's no such thing as an Adwords reseller (well, no such 'official' thing anyway) - all they mean by this is that they use the adwords system. An adwords qualified company has to have passed an exam and met certain criteria to be qualified - although the exam is very very easy and all you would have ot do is watch a couple of the adwords videos to be able to pass, so it's not necessarily any indication of knowledge base in my opinion. An Adwords Qualified Company would be your best bet on the current info - but what you really want to do is check out their experience as lots of PPC managers have never needed / bothered to get the adwords qualification but have managed very large successful accounts...
According to Google there is. http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_in/adwords/reseller/overview_en.html Today was the first i had heard of it too.
Well, you learn something new every day in online marketing! My only experience before of adwords resellers were organisations who used this phrases to give them a it more credibility with Google. After looking at the description the same still applies - if you have two agencies asking you for business and either has these qualifications (or none!) then the experience is still what counts - also have a look at their sites or any profiles you can find and see if they're active on here or webmasterworld or the official google adwords help forum
hi petes They are new to me too, but seems legit (from the links you've seen). I've - just heard about them because I came across an Australian company saying they are one of only seven in the country. Not much about it on the net though - surprisingly, not about the Aussie resellers anyway. But I did come across the Google summary pages which shows the company details of the resellers - just not anything else. According to the company I talked to, "Adwords Authorised Resellers" get special training face-to-face from direct from Google quite regularly (think monthly or quarterly) updating them about the ins and outs of adwords and algoritm changes that may affect their clients Adwords / SEO listings. They also have to have a very high AdWords success rate to be a reseller. I forget what it is, but I can probably ask them again. So yeah - not anyone can claim to be an "Adwords Authorised Resellers" -- but many, many places are "Adwords Qualified Companies". They just have to complete that online AdWords training and have a minimum quarterly AdWords spend.