Changes at Raven Tools!

[matbennett]

Received this today as well, just as I was leaving the office.  Weird.  Does this mean that Google are changing their API terms and everyone is going to have similar problems, or I wonder if it is specific to Raven.

I don't use them for PPC management, but they're still useful tools to have.

[JonathanSmith]

Exactly my thoughts...I haven't heard anything from SEOMoz so I can only assume that it's Raven specific, but that would be a big issue for Raven!

[David_ODonnell]

Oh crap, I'm glad I checked the Q&A today as I didn't event receive an email from Raven about this crucial change. This will obviously impact their reporting functionality and take away from their core value of having everything (adwords, analytics, social)  available via the one login...

[NakulGoyal]

I did not see that email come in. But that's a big change. What does Raven have to say about it ? Any other vendors using Adwords API facing similar issues ? Knock Knock Moz team.

[matbennett]

I used Raven before they added lots of adwords tools and I'll use them if they go.  I still think it is one of the best value toolsets out there.  I say this as I don't want people to think I'm knocking a great product.  However hereis the main part of the mail that went out:

--- start ---

Raven received notice from Google late last week that we would lose access to its AdWords API. Without API access, Raven can't provide Google AdWords research, management and reporting to our customers. There's no short-term solution that will allow Raven to keep its AdWords API access and not affect other tools important to many of our customers.That's why, beginning at 11:59 p.m CST (GMT-5) on this Wednesday, Nov. 14,** Raven Internet Marketing Tools will no longer offer AdWords authentication, tools or reporting data.**First, I want to stress that your Google AdWords accounts and campaigns will not be affected. You can still log in to https://adwords.google.com to manage those accounts and campaigns. This change only affects Raven’s ability to sync your AdWords data in our platform.Second, I want to apologize. We know that this is more than an inconvenience to you. We’re urgently researching alternate data to integrate with Raven, but we don’t have specifics or a timetable to share yet.Since we will no longer be able to provide AdWords reports, I strongly suggest that you export or report any Google AdWords metrics before the cut-off date. For step-by-step instructions on how to download or report on your Google AdWords metrics to date, please see this article from our Knowledge Base.-- end --They then went on to list the exact parts that will be affected - tool by tool and their plan for tackling each.

The impact on keyword manager and serp tracker are bad for me (particularly as these are two areas that I think they do much better than seomoz).  I hope that they will find alternative, credible, data sources for those.

[NakulGoyal]

Thanks Mat for a copy of their email.

[carlos4]

Do we know yet if this is Raven specific or if this is something that will affect all tools which use the API? Moz - what are you hearing?

I'm naturally very suspicious of everything Google does and this seems like they're moving to eliminate third party reporting services. Thoughts?

[randfish]

A few folks on this thread asked how this might affect SEOmoz. As you've probably noticed over the past couple months, our AdWords API and data access has also been intermittently down (and is now down again). This affects the keyword difficulty tool (though not the difficulty scores, as those don't use AdWords data), and it affects the keyword pages in the web app.

The basic story is that we're expecting Google not to give access back, but you never know. They're hard to communicate with, inconsistent, and don't have any guarantees, even though we pay for this data. Thus, my best guess would be that they'll be shutting it off for lots of organic tool providers (like Moz & Raven). If you want AdWords search volume data, you'll probably have to go direct.

Our plan in the short term is to start using data from Bing, and then eventually to see if we can build a good metric that correlates well with search volume as reported by AdWords (like we do with PageRank->MozRank or Page Authority->Google Rankings). It's gonna be a slog, but this appears to be how Google wants it.

[matbennett]

Thanks for the update Rand.

They're hard to communicate with, inconsistent, and don't have any guarantees, even though we pay...

In a weird sort of way it'd good to know that they treat customers of all sizes with an even hand

[JonathanSmith]

Thanks Rand...

It's amazing that a company the size of Google with the monopoly that it has in most markets can operate in this way.

[matbennett]

There is more from Raven on their blog today.  https://raventools.com/blog/update-google-adwords-availability-in-raven/

Interesting what they are saying (or not saying) about other people having access.

[carlos4]

The EVIL GOOGLE trend continues...

They're acting this way because they can and they will continue to push down competitors until the government steps in. This is what happens when a company becomes a monopoly.

[mypctechs]

Satisfying the shareholders at any cost really helps to simplify the decision making process considerably. Ever since the Google Wave debacle a few years back, it seems that everything I've seen new and innovative from Google has been less 'cool for techie' and more 'good idea to make more profit'.

It seems we can count the Adwords API as yet another project headed to join the scrapheap in the Google Labs junkyard. Useful for some but not profitable enough to keep around.

[randfish]

We've only received notice that we can't use it, even if we pay. I suspect that many other tool providers like us and Raven also had access revoked, but I can't say for certain.

[matbennett]

another update to this.  Adwords was restored to Raventools today.

[matbennett]

another update to this.  Adwords was restored to Raventools today.