How Google Can Increase Its Revenue

Hi Google,

I’ve decided to write this post to directly to you, since sometimes the best way to communicate is through a company's self-interest instead of bemoaning changes in the current paid media landscape.

Your products are embedded in our lives and many, many businesses rely on the Google Ads platform and ecosystem to obtain new customers. 

If you ask almost any seasoned paid media advertiser “do you think Google has advertiser’s best interests at heart” unfortunately - many will so no. 

The current DOJ case isn’t helping dispel this either despite the litany of innovative updates actually helping advertisers.

This isn’t good for your public perception, product adoption, and scrutiny let alone for advertisers that would venture off into other platforms.

I love Google Ads - its a powerful way for small businesses and companies to acquire customers.

However, there are pain points that cause you to lose out on revenue, such as the following:

• Search partner network inventory have many unqualified prospects and job seekers - there needs to be more stringent criteria here or controls for advertisers;

• There’s way too much junk in the display inventory pool - this needs to be cleaned up vigorously. Doing so will enhance your performance max product and increase advertiser adoption;

• The Google Ads interface is constantly changing - yes the way we buy paid media ads isn’t the same anymore and changed many times throughout the years. It would be way better for users to keep the UX the same and iterate instead;

• There are fewer campaign-type options available for purchase - local campaigns, individual discovery campaigns & Gmail only have all been removed. Yes, eventually the automated campaigns & AI will outperform all others, however, there are still many cases in the long tail of advertisers where this change is detrimental to business - especially smaller one’s;

• The automate everything mindset doesn’t help nimble small businesses. These advertisers simply can’t generate enough data in order for automation to fully enable the best performance out of their advertising opportunity;

• B2B marketing targeting options haven’t fully matured yet within Google Ads;

With all this being said, there are still many positives and untapped opportunities to improve the entire ecosystem for Google, advertisers and agencies. 

Here’s what I would implement to increase Google’s revenue:

• Integrate LLMs within the campaign setup in Google Ads - this could be in the form of an on-boarding questionnaire to supplement the negative keyword information from target CPA. Imagine a small B2B advertiser not triggering irrelevant queries or overlapping B2C intent queries from their keywords. This would certainly increase their chances of getting more (& better) conversions and grow the spend of B2B advertisers;

• Create an AI who's sole purpose is to constantly generate negative keywords.

• Get rid of the automate everything mindset - not all users of the Google Ads platform are rookies. Many sophisticated advertisers would much prefer the old way of buying paid media and would increase their ad-spend through more control. There is a strong argument to be made that this way of buying airplanes still have manual modes and dials for everything despite having some of the most groundbreaking automation known to man;

• Remove no or low value inventory from Performance Max - one colleague describe this campaign to me as a blessing and a curse. A fitting analogy since it either performs well or horrifically. Additional exclusion mechanisms need to be put in place to avoid the situation where low value conversions train the algorithm incorrectly.

• Build an environment where the credibility of marketing agencies thrive - It sadly doesn’t seem that the interests of marketing agencies and Google are fully aligned at present. Certification from Google should hold real weight, being a partner should be more prestigious, and agencies should be enabled to offer truly unique insights and performance to clients.  Imagine a world where unique in-house tools such as anonymised click share and industry data are also shared with marketing agencies. It could only produce a healthier ecosystem.

• Enforce a no tolerance policy towards bad actors - come down like a hammer towards abusers of the AdSense network that harm display advertisers. 

• Limit available ad slots across an entire screen - users are much more likely to click when ads are placed well within a page. A page littered with ads is a terrible user experience. Less is more;

• Use AI to clean up inventory and accidental clicks (especially on apps) for advertisers. I feel so strongly against ad fraud and viewability that there should be a mini-marketplace within the Google Ads interface available for advertiser protection;

• Allow for more stringent control over ad placements and viewability on display that’s already readily available within DV360;

• Roll out a beta test for a new bidding strategy pay-for-conversion value model for e-commerce clients;

• Allow bid caps in all bidding options - there’s no reason for advertisers to pay 10x-20x the market rate on some of their clicks. Yes there short term profits here, but this gets overshadowed by underbelly of the anger, regulation and penalties it will create.

• Provide custom suggestions, insights and recommendations for each user - this could be greatly enhanced with LLMs to make this unique per industry.

• Provide more control over selecting search partners - many advertisers would be able to select where they want to advertise instead of having to cut out this network entirely as a result of a few bad apples.

• Don’t hide search terms - there are many cases where privacy is not a factor. This allows advertisers to add more keywords and increase their spend in their accounts. Advertisers are not in favor of black box media buying and expect transparency in their purchases.

• Bring back local campaigns - these are essential for small and micro businesses. There’s a massive long tail of unoptimized accounts in the SME space that Google cannot possibly service. 

And lastly - bring back Google Optimize even if we have to pay for it.