No Canada? Google and the GAP

Q) What looks like an American, walks like an American, talks like and American but often gets confused (by Americans) for a duck simply because it is not an American? A) A Canadian.

Today appears to be Canada Day in the search engine marketing media, spurred by a thread from the Search Engine Watch forums titled, “Does Canada Really Exist?”.

The original poster, “Helen” is a search marketing expert working with Toronto based firm, Non-Linear Creations. She can’t sign her company up to be certified Google Advertising Professionals because her company is located in Canada.

Non-Linear Creations is a large online marketing agency in downtown Toronto. The firm handles some very large clients including Petro Canada, Chapters/Indigo Books, the National Research Council, and even the House of Commons Policy and Planning Department. Clearly, Helen’s company is a pretty big player in the Canadian online services scene.

Unfortunately, her company, along with over a hundred other search marketing firms located in Canada, is not eligible to be considered a Google Advertising Professional.

Helen can easily walk eight blocks to visit Google over lunch. Her office is located on Wellington St, in the shadow of the CN Tower and the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Google maintains a Canadian sales office at 161 Bay St. that would also be shadowed by the CN Tower if it weren’t for the half-dozen skyscrapers packed in between. They are so close to each other that each office could form a street hockey team and play pick-up games in the alley behind Nathan Phillips Square during work breaks. If they got together after work, they could cap a quick game with drinks at any one of the thousands of watering holes pocketing downtown Toronto.

Though they can drink and play street-hockey together, Helen can’t get together with Google as a certified Google Advertising Professional because her firm is Canadian.

Andrew Goodman from Page-Zero Media has the same problem, or at least he would if he cared to care about it. “Fortunately I’ve only ever had one prospect ask about the certification and s/he was not the type of client we would have taken on (being a certified lunatic and off-topic ranter),” he wrote in the Search Engine Watch discussion. Located even closer to Google’s Canada sales office than Helen is, Andrew’s firm is considered one of the premier PPC marketing firms in the world.

“My biggest problem with GAP is the implication that some people are qualified to work with Google Advertising when all they’ve done is write a simple test”, he said in a short phone interview. Andrew, by the way, wrote one of the definitive books “Winning Results with Google AdWords”. He can’t get a Google Advertising Professional designation for his company. He is Canadian.

When Andrew, Richard and I were walking around the Googleplex in San Jose together in August, we joked about finding Google’s famous street-hockey equipment and challenging anyone present to a game. Though the ‘plex was locked down tighter than Fort Knox (6000 search marketers were partying there at the time), we would have had a better chance getting our hands on a Google hockey stick than we would getting our agencies approved as Google Advertising Professionals. We are each, after all, Canadians.

Get the drift? Just to hammer this one fully into our home and native land, the recognized premier expert on AdWords and AdSense advertising, JenSense is a Canadian. She lives within bike-riding distance of my south-Vancouver Island office.

Why can’t Canadian search marketing agencies sign up for Google Advertising Professional certification? Apparently, because Canada is not on the list of approved countries. The UK is on the list. So is France. Russia, Finland, Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Equatorial Guinea are all on the list. Heck, even vowel-challenged Kyrgyzstan is on the list.

Also missing from the list are Central and South American countries, Australia and New Zealand. As a matter of fact, the program is only open to businesses with mailing addresses in the US, or in a European, Middle Eastern or African country. That means Brazilian, Mexican, Japanese and Indonesian search marketers can’t become certified Google Advertising Professionals either.

Why? Nobody knows but Google and, by the time I reached this point in this post, they haven’t returned my phone calls. Perhaps I should steal a trick from other Canadian journalists and get a New York based answering service with a juicy 212 area code. That way, the PR department at Google might return my calls faster. I am after all, one of them Canadians.