Google’s backwards ad thinking

I love Google ads. 

In a world where advertisers consistently demonstrate the definition of insanity: doing more of the same thing because it’s not working - Google turns things on their head. And in doing so, they turn advertising into what marketers always claim it is (despite knowing better): useful information for buyers. 

Gerry McGovern at Giraffe Forum touches on this in a recent post:

Google Deliberately Sells Fewer Ads - and May Have Gone Too Far” was a recent heading in the New York Times. “Some of the softness in Google’s advertising revenue, moreover, was self-inflicted,” the Times article stated. “Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president for product management, said that Google had chosen to reduce its advertising coverage - the percentage of Web pages on which it displays advertising - to an all-time low.

“That’s a puzzling decision on the surface. Virtually any other company facing slow economic times would be interested in increasing the places in which it could sell ads. It certainly wouldn’t take steps to reduce them.

“But Mr. Rosenberg said that Google has no plans to increase its coverage because of its efforts to improve what it calls “ad quality” - the idea that Google should only show ads that users actually like. Mr. Rosenberg said that the company’s co-founder, Larry Page, would like to see even fewer ads.

“Larry often says we would be better off if we showed one ad - the perfect ad,” said Mr. Rosenberg.”

If you’ve spent much time working with Google AdWords, you’ve run into the ad quality issue. If your ad isn’t working - the click-through is low - Google will turn it off. This seems counter-intuitive; even if your ad is crap, every click brings Google money, so why shouldn’t they leave it there to collect a few more pennies?

Because those ads reduce the overall quality of AdWords ads, and make them less useful to people. In the longer term, that means that people will stop trusting them to be useful, and stop clicking on them - even the good ones. 

It’s smart. 

How many media would turn away your ad because it’s a bad ad? How many media are cluttered with ads that readers or viewers or listeners have gotten very good at tuning out? Google is trying to make sure that when you are using their services, those ads are a useful thing. 

 

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