I don’t know how long ago it was and I’m too lazy to look, but I’m gonna say it was around 10-15 years ago that Google came up with Partner Rewards for agencies. Basically it was the Google Ads version of going to the ticket gift shop at Dave & Buster’s — the more advertisers you brought in and got to spend more and more of their money with Google, the more points you got, and then at the end of each quarter, you can redeem them for prizes. They weren’t necessarily world-rocking gifts by any means; it was almost always Google-branded merch of various kinds — clothes, inexpensive tech, games, etc., all the way up to the mother lode, which was a Google Partners branded ping-pong table for the office. Way better exchange rate than Dave & Buster’s for sure, where you get a $3 air freshener after spending $75 in games. But hey, it was all gravy for us agencies — it was something for nothing, since we were all already busting our chops to get new advertisers in the door in order to make a good living. If Google wanted to throw in a Google Partners hoodie or a pack of moleskines in every Google color or whatever else, then hey, we’ll take it, and thank you much.
After some years though, agencies got tired of prizes that seemed to slide a little more toward the Dave & Busters exchange rate, especially as the amount of money we brought into Google Ads started to skyrocket. Was a Google Partners backpack and a four-to-one USB splitter really an appropriate sweetener for managing, say, $250,000 per month in spend? As Google got richer, we started to expect more and eventually captured some territory when Google overhauled and outsourced the entire system, and post-overhaul, the prizes got way better. You could get laptops and phones and tablets and a minifridge and a weird bicycle that was somehow always out of stock and a lot more mid-grade items like JBL speakers, lower-end Google Home products, etc.
So for several years after that, life was better in the Google Partner, save for that weird redirect glitch where you have to login with your Google ID seven times before you land in the actual goodies store. Plenty of cool stuff in there, but some Partners still lamented that you can’t really get anything practical. OK, by “some Partners” I mean “me.” But I’m sure I wasn’t alone. You know how it is; you unwrap an obscenely expensive, obscenely ugly sweater from Grandma and you think, “my GOD Grandma….just give me the cash next time!” Same with Google: I appreciate the very shiny espresso machine and the Tuscany pizza oven but Grandma Google, seriously….*justgivemthedamnmoney*.
Quietly, a couple years ago, Google answered our whining prayers. It’s not cash, and you may miss it if you don’t look closely. It’s called “GoGift,” and if you too are a more pragmatic Google Partner, you’re in luck.
GoGift is a gift card that’s good for — other gift cards. You pick the country where it’s going to be spent, and then you get a huge selection of gift cards that apply to that country.
Pop quiz: Is this a $30 tote bag?
GoGift is Danish, and if you go in the front end of the website, it appears to only serve Scandinavian folk. The access to American & other country cards is via their corporate deals they do with companies such as, you guessed it, the big G. (I know I should be calling them Alphabet by now but I’m never gonna, so there). Among the hundreds of gift cards Americans can get are from department stores, restaurants, specialty shops, and the big one for me, Amazon. I’ve been a single father for 15 years and I’ve still got one at home, so I’m still down to save time and money on auto-deliver subscriptions for paper towels and toilet paper and light bulbs and laundry soaps and dishwasher soap and dry goods and K-cups and air filters and dryer sheets and — well, you get it. GoGift apparently does provide Walmart gift cards also, but they’re not available to us Googlers for whatever reason.
How’s the exchange rate?
Well I’m glad you asked, because it’s actually pretty impressive. Part of the reason it seems so impressive is that Google exchange rate for other stuff is so comically bad. Let’s start on the low end here. 600 points in the Partner Rewards store gets you a $50 Amazon gift card via gogift. That’s cheaper than the points you give up for a very average-looking beanie or a four-pack of Google Partner coffee cups (both 610 points), a Google-branded regular-old tote bag (660 points) and a Google trucker hat (680 points). Baffling.
Move on up to the 3,000-point range, where 3k buys you a $250 Amazon gift card. OR….wait for it….a reproduction of a vintage movie theater popcorn machine. For 2,600 points, you can get one of those huge brewpub-sized Jenga sets. Wanna get even weirder? Let’s slum it down at the 300-point level for a second. For those 300 points you can get a $25 Amazon gift card. For 290 you can get a PEN — and not even a great pen, not even an above-average pen, just a regular-ass ink pen — branded with Google Partners.
And for 310 points — yes, 10 points more than a $25 gift card — you can get… a yo-yo. I’m not joking. Yes, the yo-yo says Google Partners on it. No, it’s not a yo-yo with special powers. It’s just a yo-yo that you open, play with for two minutes, get the string irretrievably tangled and then toss into the trash all within 40 minutes.
OK look, let’s don’t get too far afield here, because the point isn’t to make fun of available prizes you don’t want; the point is, there are inefficiencies in the Google Partners Rewards marketplace that you may be overlooking. That you *were* overlooking, I should say, but having read this, no longer are. If you haven’t discovered it yet, hope into gogift at the end of the quarter and see what you find. I bet you’ll thank me.
You’re very welcome. Questions and comments welcome.
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