My colleagues and I were invited to the Google headquarters in Dublin, because of our various implementations of AdSense for Zeelandnet.nl (the company that i work for) We’d thought it would be a great experience, if only to learn some ‘best practices’ for implementing Google services and to strengthen the ties with our friends abroad.

The trip turned out to be far more valuable than just acquiring handy tips…

The start of our journey was a wee bit troublesome due to a malfunctioning Garmin navigation system that decided to send as far away from the airport @ Charleroi as possible. We nearly made it (screeching car tires, wrong parking lot, running to the checkin) This made us all a bit silly from the nerves. The arrival in Dublin wasn’t a walk in the park either: The (drunk) bus-attendant send us to a wrong university. So after a long journey we deserved a good night on the town with lot’s of Guinness. and so we did.

The next day we went to Google to meet up with our accountmanager Alexandru, who had set up a programme for the day. We were proud to have our picture taken with him:

 From left to right: Joris, Maria, Jeroen, Marco and Alexandru.

We kicked of with Alexandru and Walter, who gave us  information on the inner workings of AdSense and supplied us with valuable tips on how to generate more revenue for ZeelandNet. They also gave examples of other succesfull implementations in other websites.

After that we had a short meeting with Damien, the head of Adsense and Youtube for Europe, the Midde-east and Africa. I was very impressed by the openness and candour of his conversation. Damien was interested in our experiences with Google products. We supplied him with feedback from our users and we gave us our vision on how (or if) multimedial content could be monetized.

After that we spoke with Els (a represent of Youtube) about legal issues with regards to videocontent. We also spoke with Mark about the possiblities of adwords for online marketing.

These meeting took the whole day, but it seem to pass in an instant. Alexandru was so kind as to take us on a tour to see the niceness of Ireland. We took a train down the coast and made a very pleasant walk.

I guess we were all impressed the most by the corporate culture of Google. It is very open, the employees are very well facilitated, and it just all looks supercool. It’s serious business nonetheless, and Googlers are very skilled and motivated.

@Alexandru: Thanks for your time and attention. You gave us a wonderfull time and you’ve inspired us to keep on improving our business and ourselves.