With the announcement of the “Adwords Business Credit Card”, Google has officially entered the credit industry.
After a successful year-long pilot scheme in the United States, Google has teamed up with Barclays to issue MasterCard credit cards usable exclusively on purchases of Adwords – the small adverts that appear on the site’s search engine.
The initiative is primarily intended to help its customers finance these purchases through offering credit ranging from $200 (aprx £125) to $100,000 (aprx £62,000) a month at a highly competitive rate of 11.9 per cent. The exact terms can be found here.
The pilot scheme revealed that the service led to significant growth in advertising purchases, with 74 per cent of respondents using the Adwords card. Google expects that the full deployment of its credit scheme will produce a multiplier effect that will encourage customers to allocate an increasing share of their marketing budget to Google Adwords.
Google treasurer Brent Callinicos revealed as much in an interview the FT, declaring that Google was “not trying to run the financing business as a profit centre”, solely as a lubricant to stimulate advertising investment.
Google began inviting small and medium sized business to join the program from Sunday.
In partnership with Comenity Capital Bank, a similar credit card will be released in the United States in the upcoming weeks with an 8.99 per cent rate of interest.
This isn’t the first time a technology giant has made a foray into financial services: Apple offers financing through its own Visa, whilst Amazon launched its own credit initiative last week to independent sellers wanting to list products at the Amazon Marketplace.
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