Have you ever noticed that when a product or technology has been around for a while, it gets dumbed down?
Take the personal computer. My first experience with computers was in 8th grade – we got an 8K Commodore PET. It ran in BASIC and had a cassette drive to run programs. For my 8th grade science fair project, I wrote a Hangman program in BASIC – and got an A+. It was the most popular project at the fair.

Anybody else remember these?
Nowadays, who writes their own programs? Computers have grown more complex, and yet easier for the masses to use. Want to run a program? Just double click or tap the icon! A 5 year old can use today’s computers, which wasn’t the case with those early models.
As technology becomes widely adopted, it gets dumbed down. That’s great for the masses, but not for professionals who want to dig deeper.
And that’s what’s happened with PPC.
As PPC has grown and been adopted by more and more people, it’s now geared to the lowest common denominator. Just yesterday, I lamented Facebook’s ad approval process on Twitter. Instead of immediately disapproving ads and letting us appeal the disapproval, they let the ads run for a short time, and then disapprove them. It ends up taking more time in the end. I’d rather be disapproved right away, and then figure it out or contact Facebook to fix it, rather than being approved and finding out later the ad was disapproved. But I suspect that inexperienced advertisers like it the way it is.
Just look at any social PPC interface and you’ll see what I mean. They’re not designed for power users. They’re designed for the local business or social club to be able to use them. Twitter is particularly horrible. Have multiple campaigns in Twitter Ads and want to navigate between them? Sorry, you’ll have to return to the Home screen to do that. Want to run a custom report with all the data you need? Sorry, there’s one report and that’s it. Want to download recommended targets or by-tweet reports for promoted tweets? Can’t. It’s horrible. Inexperienced advertisers probably don’t do these things, but some of us want to!
LinkedIn is just as bad. Terrible reporting, terrible navigation, terrible campaign editing – the list goes on.
Facebook at least has Power Editor, but even that is glitchy. It’s frustrating.
And what about Enhanced Campaigns? I believe Enhanced Campaigns were rolled out to reduce complexity in Adwords. Why else would Google have focused so heavily on pizza places in all the Enhanced Campaigns webinars and documentation?
For those of us who wanted complex campaign structure, along with device control, we’re now out of luck. While there are many positive things about Enhanced Campaigns, there are also many negatives. Unfortunately, the negatives probably only affect professional campaign managers, not inexperienced advertisers.
I still hold out hope that the social PPC platforms will improve, and that Google will give us a tablet bid modifier. Do you think I’m dreaming, or is there a chance things will get better? How have you experienced the dumbing down of PPC? Share in the comments!