Google on Search and Ads
December 8, 2020
I read “How Google Search Ads Work.” I usually ignore pay to play explanations. The phrase “pay to play” makes clear what is happening. An advertiser wants to display his or her message in front of people who are prospects. Pay more money and get more ads in front of prospects. For me, that’s the end of the story.
But there’s more. The write up from Darshan Kantak tackles the “more” from Google’s unique and advantaged position.
I noted these statements in the article:
We’ve long said that we don’t show ads–or make money–on the vast majority of searches.
That makes sense. Put ads where people are. However, people when viewed as statistical chunks are where the ads are placed. What outliers do is useful for disposing of excess inventory. Semantic relaxing or human mouse clicks can help too.
The article points out:
The experience of our users comes first, which is why we only show ads that are helpful to people. Even for the fraction of search queries where we do show ads, we don’t make a cent unless people find it relevant enough to click on the ad.
This statement reinforces the point that ads don’t appear too often. Check out the ads displayed on text search results pages from a desktop computer. Here’s an example for the query cloud computing with the ads before the unpaid search results:
Then at the foot of the page, there are more ads; for example:
The write up is interesting because it strikes me as what seems to be “reinvention.” The idea is that the simple proposition of putting ads in front of eyeballs is shaped to present itself as a benign process designed to improve access to information.
Interesting. Will those investigating Google for its ad business practices see the brilliance of the Google approach? Who knows. But I like the “ah, shucks,” “hey, everybody” approach.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2020
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