Apple will win the tablet wars simply because they’re Apple.  There’s no confusion.  Everything’s designed, branded, and marketed in-house.  Name three current tablets, or even phones, off the top of your head (no cheating now!) that can run Google’s Droid?  I can’t.  Here’s a list. “Too many choices” says Johnny Consumer who just spent half of his lunch break reading that wiki article.  This is not to say that Apple is the superior product by any means, they’re just really, really good at marketing themselves.  For instance, who remembers Audio Highway’s Listen Up player?  It was the first ‘mp3 player’.  Ask any stranger on the street what the first mp3 player was and I bet you 99 out of 100 say the iPod.  Although I’d love to be wrong, I think this tablet war is over before it even started.

Most of the requirements are straightforward, and have some common sense. There were a few, however, that confused us when we decided to get the badges on our ads. There were these:

• Place Google Checkout buttons before your login pages

  Buyers should only have to provide their login, purchasing, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, and any other information once. If you require users to register or sign in to your site, you must ensure Google Checkout and Buy Now buttons are available before the login process so buyers are able to check out with Google Checkout without having to log in. You may still track visits and personalize pages using cookies.

• Direct buyers quickly to Google

  Buyers who click the Google Checkout button on your site should see the Google Checkout confirmation page within one second and without seeing any intermediate pages.

What it seemed to us, and what it appears to mean, is that all customer information is maintained and billing is done exclusively by and through Google. That works great in retail sales of individual items. It doesn’t work at all for repeating, continual services like the web hosting we do. So it seemed like Google’s Badges were not to be ours.

However, to our pleasant surprise, Google placed the badges on our ads as soon as we got several transactions using Google Checkout completed. So don’t fret too much about those two requirements, it seems they are more guidelines than rules. Follow them if you can, we don’t want to abuse the system, but don’t throw the badges idea out just because you need to gather user information and logins.

Just to give an idea, our Google AdWords campaign was getting about a 2-3% click through rate before, which isn’t bad. After we put the badges up, we started getting 5-6%, double our previous click through rate. We didn’t see too much of an increase in Google Checkout money coming in, although (since Google cuts you a BIG break in processing fees if you spend money in AdWords) we wish they would! So they aren’t clicking just so they can use Google Checkout, their eyes are drawn naturally to a graphic on the otherwise text-only Google Search Results Page. For example:

And it even works well for the side ads, as with here:

Notice how you can’t help but look at the ad with the Google Checkout Badge? It’s extremely powerful! Use it!