Google Adwords is shutting down the GAW agency support teams in a few weeks.

GAW is switching to a new model: support in a few verticals (incl. airlines, automotive, finance, etc.)

To qualify for support in that vertical, the minimum per client is $15,000 per month. If your client spends $35K, they get support. But another client at $12K gets zero support. Only the ones at $15K get support.

Furthermore, the GAW Verticals Support Person is assigned to the client, not the agency. So when the client switches agencies, the Verticals Support person continues with the client.

My Comments: Agency support started about five years ago. Only a few dozen agencies had support. The GAW team was surprisingly small.

But they were terrific. I've met many of them and they stay in touch, even after they move to other divisions or leave Google. There was a large flow of information both ways: they told me about upcoming issues; they helped me with my books about GAW; I made many suggestions for improvements (some of my ideas are standard features in GAW), wrote bug reports, etc.

By shutting down Agency Teams, which shuts down their long-term connection to agencies, Google loses that informal contact. Most large clients are clueless about GAW, so they won't make useful suggestions.

This also further reduces the relation between GAW and agencies. Only a few agencies have large clients, so most agencies will lose their GAW support. The primary relation is between GAW and the client, not the agency, which weakens the client/agency relation.

I really like our GAW team; they're great people (and I also like my contacts at Bing and Yahoo!); how many of you sent them a Christmas card (yes, the kind with a postage stamp)? And they sent me cards too. It's a pity this is coming to an end.