Fluff from the naval of my mind

I am just going through the process of setting up an AdWords account on Google for use in promoting my business. The process seems straightforward enough and the proposition seems sound: only paying for clicks, not impressions, and I can control the maximum cost of each click and the total budget. However! Going through the process of setting up billing information I came across this little nugget.

I chose to pre-pay for the ads, not that I don’t trust Google but – who am I kidding, I don’t trust them. Anyway, I was signing up for pre-pay and Google demands my credit card details as part of the set up. Okay. I’m not sure why they need them on record, but I’ll roll with it, after all I use several other sites that bill against this card regularly. Right at the bottom of the page is this little notice.

What? Seriously, £5? Non-refundable?

I know many sites make a nominal charge to a credit card to confirm the supplied details are correct and the card is active, but this is usually a very small amount and is typically only done when setting up a subscription. Since I am only setting up a pre-pay system surely all Google needs is a method to take occasional payments to top up my account’s credit? PayPal should be good enough (or even Google checkout), but no. I have to supply a credit card to associate with the account AND pay for the privilege!

Okay, £5 is small beer in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the principle of the thing that bugs me. Why does Google incur this cost when no one else seems to? It just feels like I’m being fleeced. Grrr!

Unfortunately, Google are the 500lb gorilla in the on-line advertising world and there really is no better alternative to achieve what I want. I’m going to have to bend over and hope there’s not too much more grit in the Vaseline.