36 ms·

Google does little to reduce advertisers' costs

168 points by sh_tomer 3y ago

shortrounddev2 3y ago
Reason you might want to target queries for your own site with ads is that your competitors will do so and you want to outbid them. If I search for the name of a therapist group in my city, the top result right now is a competing firm which does online therapy. But I agree that bids with specific intent for your site should at least cost less than bids for queries for products in your industry
- JeremyBarbosa 3y ago
  This situation is always the most frustrating to deal with. It is borderline phishing and should be as simple of a fix as making it a ToS violation. Just like all of Google's dead products, this type of behavior speaks volumes to their disregard for users, both individual search consumers and enterprise ad buyers.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    I do not see it today, but some months ago if you searched for CosmosDB on Bing, you would get ads for MongoDB Atlas. Gave me a chuckle. Left hand - Right Hand.
  - echelon 3y ago
    It feels like extortion and trademark violation. I wish the FTC would prohibit buying ads for brand names.
    - jrockway 3y ago
      There's kind of a grey area, though. What if I want to redo the windows in my house? Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft.
      - echelon 3y ago
        It's not a grey area if you're putting out an ad for a product in the same category as the registered trademark. Putting up a "Nintendo Switch" ad on the "Steam Deck" search term, and vice versa, is wrong. Even more so when big companies camp on the trademarks of smaller startups. I'm angry because this has happened to me.
      - gbear605 3y ago
        Trademarks are for a given category. Apple has a trademark on “Apple” in the computing space but they don’t run up against apple orchards.
        jrockway 3y ago
        Sure, but the point is that you have to know what category someone is search for in order to apply the ad filtering rules. If people search for "windows", Google has to take its best guess on whether you want Windows 11 or quotes on replacing your wall-holes. Even then, what counts as an ad that competes with Microsoft? Can ubuntu advertise their Windows alternative? Can an authorized reseller advertise themselves as the best place to buy a copy? This problem sounds almost impossible to me, and the cure almost sounds worse than the disease.
        brookst 3y ago
        I suspect there are very few searches for the single word “windows”. Google probably knows the category for the vast majority of searches from additional words, previous queries, etc. But I think it would be crazy to prohibit competitive advertising in the first place.
        VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
        Apple is presently suing a Swiss fruit association over its trademark on "apple". https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle...
        3y ago
    - jonas21 3y ago
      In fact, the FTC did the opposite, ruling that 1-800 Contacts unlawfully harmed competition when it sued competitors who bid on its name and obtained settlements preventing them from doing so. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/11/ftc-commissioners-find-1-800-contacts-unlawfully-harmed-competition-online-search-advertising https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/11/...
      - stock_toaster 3y ago
        Reading the linked judgement seems to imply there was more nuance. It seems 1800 contacts actively colluded with competitors to not cross bid on common terms, negative terms, etc. It would be interesting if this was only about “exact phrase” matches and trademarks, but it seems a bit more complicated than that at an initial scan. Please correct me if I misinterpreted the findings though.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - schemester 3y ago
      The FTC doesn’t have that power.
    - vkou 3y ago
      How is it trademark violation to put up, say, Toyota billboards around the Honda dealership? Advertise the NYT in the Washington Post? Have a big freakin' Coke banner at the end of the soda aisle? Yes, this kind of advertising is a stupid zero-sum game, but our society in general, and free markets in particular have a lot of stupid zero-sum games. I see no reason why this one should be illegal.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Would Google let you target ads against its own properties?
        jonas21 3y ago
        Uh, yes? When I search for "google cloud", I see an ad for Azure. When I search for "pixel 7", I get ads for Verizon and T-Mobile.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        I get a sponsored link for Google Cloud. And when I search for Google Pixel, I get a banner with 7 pictures and a shopping link and another link to buy a Pixel. Of course, by default I have an Ad blocker on iOS and I don’t see any ads
        brookst 3y ago
        Why does that matter? If a Toyota dealership owns the nearby land and sells billboards, they have no obligation to sell to a competitor. People keep wanting law to work like math, and it just doesn’t. Context matters.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Google could probably get into antitrust trouble if they were too aggressive about this.
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      I mean if your site is trying to deceive visitors then sure. If I search for Nike and I get an ad for N1ke.com then yeah that's bad. But if I search for Nike and I see an ad for Adidas and I proceed to buy Adidas shoes then I guess I didn't really want Nike that much to begin with?
      - harry8 3y ago
        But 99.999% of the time someone searching for jkl corp, gets and ad for jkl corp that jkl corp paid for and clicks it because it's at the top of the results. It's PURE google protection racket money paid by jkl corp so it gets the traffic of people who want to visit jkl corp. Mafia as business model is one of the many evils that google does and is.
        bagacrap 3y ago
        Jkl corp doesn't have to buy ads. Users will still be able to find it via Google. I challenge you to find a company for which its site is not discoverable via Google search. If users who really want to go to jkl corp actually can't find it via Google, then they'll probably stop relying on Google to find things.
        harry8 3y ago
        There are examples given in this very thread of people being conned by clicking the top link which was an ad interposed by google when someone was trying to get the website of their bank.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        But that's because of the phishing aspect. If a search for "Chase mortgages" leads me to Bank of America mortgages through an ad, there's no deception going on.
        harry8 3y ago
        so why do you think companies buy their own trade marked brands as keywords so that they can pay google for their organic traffic? Because they're idiots? Why do you think google moved the ads from the side where they were clearly marked and obviously not search results to the top of the search results and made it much harder to tell "this link is actually an ad"? I mean obviously for money but why do you think it made them money? What do you think of google's plans to offer deep discounts to advertisers for traffic from keyword searches for their brand or corporate identity? Reasonable?
    - srcreigh 3y ago
      It's not extortion when the search is for Y product and the customer only knows about X brand.
  - MaxGabriel 3y ago
    It’s also a huge vector for actual phishing, especially because google ads doesn’t use puny code, so it’s easy to buy ads for sites that differ by just a diacritic
    - knodi123 3y ago
      That's how my stepdad got hacked. He didn't understand bookmarks or urls or homepages, so he just opened his browser at google.com, searched for the name of his bank, clicked the first ad, and went to log in. Usually that worked for him, but once, he got a scam site, and he was on the phone with a call center in India giving them remote desktop access before a single alarm bell went off in his head. Granted, it's partly my fault for letting a loved one be that computer un-savvy, but that kind of ad should have been detected and blocked before it was ever served.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - whoisthemachine 3y ago
        It's not your fault at all, it's not on you to un-deceive your family members, it's on Google to not deceive in the first place.
        shortcake27 3y ago
        Agreed. There are so many failures on Google’s end to let this happen. One of which was allowing the advertiser to display a legitimate URL in the ad while redirecting to an illegitimate one. I really hope this isn’t the case any more.
        quickthrower2 3y ago
        Surely he can sue Google.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    Nah, unless the competing firm is violating trademark the ROI on those types of ads are abysmal.
  - duped 3y ago
    It's not borderline, it is phishing.
- jahewson 3y ago
  > bids with specific intent for your site should at least cost less than bids for queries for products in your industry They do. Your own brand name has a higher Quality Score against your own ads thus lower CPC.
- thejosh 3y ago
  This should be honestly a top priority, and has never been. For specific place names, it's super annoying. Especially for products -- Worst case is when I looked earlier there is STILL MALWARE on Bing for searches like "google chrome".
- slushh 3y ago
  What is preventing customer acquisition costs from eating almost all profits? Why should a company not bit for every potential customer up to their potential profits if only to benefit from increased scale? What's the endgame? Companies can only reduce ad expenses if they have monopolies or agreements among themselves.
- bagels 3y ago
  Yeah, I never understood how that isn't seen as a protection racket by Google.
- sp0rk 3y ago
  This is such an egregious attempt at fraud that I actually feel bad enough to scroll past the ads, when I'm searching for a particular company or website by name, and always make sure to click the actual search result. I really should not care about a large corporation paying a few cents to get me to their website, but it is so unnecessarily unfair on Google's part that it bothers me greatly.
RadixDLT 3y ago
Well, you know what they say - "A penny saved is a penny earned...by us!"
- ovao 3y ago
  This anecdote is largely irrelevant, since by virtue of the way Google positions ads in search results, it’s fair to assume that you’re simply the exception.
  - jeremykerr 3y ago
    Not even the exception, in the best case something like 1-2% of users click adds on average. The median user won't interact with them, advertising isn't for the median user. It's also fair to say this topic is explicitly focused on ads, therefore on people who would click on ads.
    - rjh29 3y ago
      The average computer user literally does not even notice the 'Sponsored' tag on google or amazon search results.
      - vkou 3y ago
        No, they probably can't find the 'sponsored' text, but they are also conditioned to know that the stuff at the top and the stuff on the side is probably ads, because every friggin website on the internet has ads in those locations.
        aeyes 3y ago
        Sometimes I get the result I am looking for in the top ad, why wouldn't I click on it? It's mostly companies which buy ads for their own brand names, for example if I search for Nike all the ads are from the official store or website. On mobile the first ad almost fills the whole screen so I'm not going to waste time scrolling further.
      - 3y ago
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
Thought experiment. X costs you 100. A person tells you they'll sell you a service to allow you to buy X for 90. How much would you pay for that service? You'd pay up to 10, which the person then pockets. That happens because the person has to competition, so knowing that X costs 100 and you're getting it for 90, they'll charge you 10. That's google. They don't have competition in search.
powera 3y ago
For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. This applies double when you are buying ads for your company's name: you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying! But people still do it, presumably on the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" theory.
- vkou 3y ago
  If you weren't paying for a search for your company name, your competitors would be paying to have their ads displayed on a search for your company name. All the major ad networks let you run all sorts of comparisons and experiments for ad ROI. If ROI was routinely negative, the billion-dollar budgets would have long been pulled back by beancounters and cost-cutters in the buying firms, especially when they have the excuse of a recession to do so. Yes, occasionally you get 'I run a boutique business and I find that <X advertising system has horrible ROI>' blog posts on HN. Maybe they are structuring their ad campaigns wrong. Maybe their business shouldn't be advertised at all. Maybe they are using the wrong channel (Search, display, social) to advertise with. It's a pain in the ass to figure this out if you're a small business. But larger businesses with serious ad devote a lot of effort to figuring this out - and will reshuffle their marketing budgets to the high ROI channels.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  > you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying! No you won't. For power users who use ad blockers or can recognize ads, maybe you will. For the majority of users those are lost clicks. (Also those are the easiest money Google can make.)
- Gustomaximus 3y ago
  > For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. Is that true? I've been in this game for quite a while now and the cast majority of business have ROI positive ads. I haven't kept record but would think 8/10 businesses type ratio.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  > For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. This applies double when you are buying ads for your company's name: you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying! Source? It’s always extremely funny to read engineers on hacker news to make claims about ads, with no understanding of how the business work. And the underlying assumption that companies throw away billions of dollars away, with no results to show for it.
Gustomaximus 3y ago
This article is correct in the lack of transparency is concerning, but the simplify eneed view is incorrect IMO. "I think Google Ads should be simpler to use (dumb it down), should be more transparent with its costs and bids, and should offer more options to control ad appearance" Firstly, more options won't simplify most likely. Secondly google has been 'simplifying' for a long time, to their advantage. Increasingly Google push people down the performance/CPA path saying our smart systems will get you the best results 'believe us we're Google' but it's mostly not true. The best results are often from a manual as possible campaign and they make this an ever harder option to take. There needs to be far better regulation here. Marketing is one of those skills where art meets science. If you let the algorithms take over they'll often look good at a base metric but as soon as you dig around you find you're sacrificing wider goals or mostly getting sales you would have anyway, or paying crazy amounts to finish off the budget type etc. Google is a great advertising platform, but adding your money, limited controls and trusting google systems to work it out is a horrible way, and something I see all too often. I suspect it's largely because you can spend an < an hour setting the easy way, or spend a day or more setting up a well researched and manual way, but on both client/agency side people don't want to spend the time/money getting foundations right, or simply have the time or aptitude. I say the best thing is for some regulator body to go over the system changes over the years and ask why features plus analytics were removed, hidden or changed and put rules about these controls and ongoing changes to live up to the level playing field tenent of good capitalism. Maybe it is happening somewhere but I haven't seen it, and it is long overdue.
- flokie 3y ago
  Would respectfully disagree. Matching a consumers query to an ad, and optimizing that outcome at a given return on investment threshold is a task best left to a computer to optimize. It is a perfect use case for reinforcement learning, and a computer can work 24 hours a day and you need to sleep. In my experience, 100/100 times the machine beats the confident manual optimizer. We (humans) don't have a great track record in beating computers at these kinds of problems, certainly not a game as simple as optimizing for a high score (driving results from an ad).
  - 3y ago
pcurve 3y ago
Majority of advertisers on Google lose money. "According to a study, 40 percent of small business owners stated that their Google Ads campaign yielded no leads. Whereas, an additional 33% of business owners noted that these campaigns produced very few leads." I've worked at large companies and every single one of them saw negative returns on their campaigns. It's a big wealth transfer mechanism.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  It's very easy to run incrementality studies and you should be doing this if you are a large company.
- chrismarlow9 3y ago
  You have to optimize and test constantly for AdWords to pay off (disable content network advertising, geographic targeting on a schedule that follows the sun, a/b testing copy) and build methods of retaining users that don't buy to eventually convert (email newsletters, add us on Facebook, sign-up for this free ebook, blah blah). My guess is small business doesn't have the time to tweak all these things. There are also small tricks about writing copy to make it economical. Social media sites have the retention mechanics built for you so I'm not surprised they convert better. Just my 2 cents as a guy who does marketing for some spare pocket change.
  - scrollaway 3y ago
    Can you send me an email, or put yours in your profile?
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Trust me bro
- cm2012 3y ago
  Yep, people spend $120b a year on Google ads, crushing the old ad industry, because it doesn't work. It's just idiots in marketing departments all the way down. (I've worked with 50+ company ad accounts and any large business will have profitable campaigns at x level spend)
iamleppert 3y ago
Google’s Ad business needs to be separated from search. Search should become like any other SaaS company, providing an API to its results and charging companies who want to run ads on top of the results. Those companies would compete among themselves, offering choice and value. They could also in theory choose another search API, providing pressure on old Google to improve and focus on its search results, divorced of any conflicting pressures from trying to operate both businesses.
- chupchap 3y ago
  Imagine Android without a Pixel. Can you imagine the hell we would have to deal with?
harry8 3y ago
Remember when google was good and gave you "search results" as best it could instead of suggestions of things it thinks you might want? In those days the search results had a white background and appeared directly below the query input. The ads were over there on the right margin with a different background and clearly identified as ads. They used to brag about how good they were at giving you the address of something specific you were searching for with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Linux nerds used to /like/ them. No really. Nowadays they're fully compromised by both money and politics and make the old days of microsoft look good. I see things like this :https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1673783596828569606 https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/16737835968285696... From a politician I don't particularly like or support fwiw and think "How dare they?" Google are fully evil.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Google search is unbelievable frustrating these days. And yeah the free speech concerns are very real. There needs to be a level of critical mass for any company that deals in communications where they are held to the same standards as the government. If >25% of the population uses your company for some form of communication censorship should be prohibited but of course we seem to be rapidly moving in a vastly different direction.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    This sort of shallow minded statement always boils down to “but we should still censor the stuff I don’t like and of course I assume everyone agrees with me” Sorry but it’s obvious you’ve never worked on this issue. It’s not easy.
    - DasIch 3y ago
      It's far from shallow minded. In Germany that's actually how the law is interpreted. The theory is that under an indirect third party effect free speech becomes effectively limited, if large companies censor people. As a result they can be compelled not to do so within reason. For example, if a social media platform bans you, you can sue them and they have to show that they have sufficient reason and that they gave you opportunity to appeal etc. If they fail, they have to unban you.
eastern 3y ago
If one just rewrites that headline as 'Google does little to reduce its own revenue' it all becomes much clearer.
dbg31415 3y ago
Shocking that a company without any real competition that cares about its stock price doesn't go out of its way to lower profits. Shocking. I'm shocked.
onion2k 3y ago
A noticeable trend in ecommerce over the past year or two is sites adding a "Why not use our app?" popup modal or banner when you hit the site or you add something to a cart. This is directly related to search ad costs. Companies are trying to reduce their reliance on search engines to drive traffic because customer acquisition costs are crazy high while the average customer spend is falling. At some point it stops being worth capturing the customer with a search ad. This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks.
- mattbee 3y ago
  This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks. When my business was new in 2003, and Google Ads too, we had a competitor bid on our name as a search term. We were outraged and found that Google had a page on, I think abusive search terms or something? But to action anything you had to write a letter to Mountain View. So we did that, citing deceptive practices or some pseudo-legal rubbish. And they actioned it! For years afterwards we saw no ads on our little UK company's name.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    I wonder if they actioned it globally or just to UK IP addresses? The UK has the ASA, so adverts aren't totally unregulated here and it's not a fraud free-for-all.
    - mattbee 3y ago
      I like to imagine someone opened the letter, rolled their eyes, opened "BadKeywords.txt", added our company name and binned it.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Alternative title: "Google does very little to minimize their profits"
amelius 3y ago
Ads are just another kind of tax. Eventually everybody pays for it as it is a part of the cost price of every product. Google's aim is to make us pay the highest possible tax. Ads should be free (but limited in the way they distract us). The most important reason is that we want the market to reward the best product, not the one with the biggest advertising budget.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Ads should be against the law. :)
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Advertising space is scarce so you need to find a fair where to choose who gets it.
  - amelius 3y ago
    No, we just need something like Yellow Pages where consumers can take a look whenever they want to be informed about new products. We must stop the vicious cycle of producers having to pay higher and higher prices to get attention (which is what Google loves). And we certainly don't want ads everywhere because we don't want to drive up global consumption unnecessarily.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      That would hurt so many businesses. People might not even know that your product exists or that they are potentially interested in your product until you advertise it. This means that small businesses are hurt because no one knows to look them up and no one knows them because their brand is weak. Ad space prices don't go higher and higher. It is auctioned off. If demand for the space goes down then the price will also go down.
      - amelius 3y ago
        I don't think so. If you want to actively find stuff there are ways to do it, like going to a tech show near you. Businesses survived before advertising was as crazy as it is today, so we can tune it down a _lot_ before bad things start happening to businesses in general.
seydor 3y ago
probably because advertisers did not care google is in the business of dashboards. as long as they can show that their spending does "something", advertisers are good
someonewhocar3s 3y ago
[dead]
pulse7 3y ago
Google search results became unusable. We need a new search engine now, which would provide good results - like the old Google...
- majani 3y ago
  Impossible since most scrapers that aren't Googlebot are viewed with suspicion by hosting and security companies.
GoToRO 3y ago
This was specifically forbiden by Google eons ago. You could not create an ad with Pepsi in it, unless you were Pepsi. What we have today is intentional, they have the system to prevent this but they choose to no longer use it. It might be that your own ad with your own brand in it is way cheaper than the competitors ads with your brand in them. Maybe they just want some money from you even when the user searched for your brand specifically. Maybe they want to train users to always click on ads (hard no to when the ad is exactlly what you searched for)
LatteLazy 3y ago
If only they'd cut advertiser's costs, we could have more advertising. And that would also be cheaper, pushier, advertising. And it would be a pity that there was a lot less cash then for things like actual content, but the important thing is to maximise the number of adverts right? Right?
glimshe 3y ago
Duh... Monopolist does nothing to reduce their profits? Why would we expect otherwise?

168 points by sh_tomer 3y ago

Reason you might want to target queries for your own site with ads is that your competitors will do so and you want to outbid them. If I search for the name of a therapist group in my city, the top result right now is a competing firm which does online therapy. But I agree that bids with specific intent for your site should at least cost less than bids for queries for products in your industry

JeremyBarbosa 3y ago
This situation is always the most frustrating to deal with. It is borderline phishing and should be as simple of a fix as making it a ToS violation. Just like all of Google's dead products, this type of behavior speaks volumes to their disregard for users, both individual search consumers and enterprise ad buyers.
- RajT88 3y ago
  I do not see it today, but some months ago if you searched for CosmosDB on Bing, you would get ads for MongoDB Atlas. Gave me a chuckle. Left hand - Right Hand.
- echelon 3y ago
  It feels like extortion and trademark violation. I wish the FTC would prohibit buying ads for brand names.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    There's kind of a grey area, though. What if I want to redo the windows in my house? Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft.
    - echelon 3y ago
      It's not a grey area if you're putting out an ad for a product in the same category as the registered trademark. Putting up a "Nintendo Switch" ad on the "Steam Deck" search term, and vice versa, is wrong. Even more so when big companies camp on the trademarks of smaller startups. I'm angry because this has happened to me.
    - gbear605 3y ago
      Trademarks are for a given category. Apple has a trademark on “Apple” in the computing space but they don’t run up against apple orchards.
      - jrockway 3y ago
        Sure, but the point is that you have to know what category someone is search for in order to apply the ad filtering rules. If people search for "windows", Google has to take its best guess on whether you want Windows 11 or quotes on replacing your wall-holes. Even then, what counts as an ad that competes with Microsoft? Can ubuntu advertise their Windows alternative? Can an authorized reseller advertise themselves as the best place to buy a copy? This problem sounds almost impossible to me, and the cure almost sounds worse than the disease.
        brookst 3y ago
        I suspect there are very few searches for the single word “windows”. Google probably knows the category for the vast majority of searches from additional words, previous queries, etc. But I think it would be crazy to prohibit competitive advertising in the first place.
      - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
        Apple is presently suing a Swiss fruit association over its trademark on "apple". https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle...
        3y ago
  - jonas21 3y ago
    In fact, the FTC did the opposite, ruling that 1-800 Contacts unlawfully harmed competition when it sued competitors who bid on its name and obtained settlements preventing them from doing so. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/11/ftc-commissioners-find-1-800-contacts-unlawfully-harmed-competition-online-search-advertising https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/11/...
    - stock_toaster 3y ago
      Reading the linked judgement seems to imply there was more nuance. It seems 1800 contacts actively colluded with competitors to not cross bid on common terms, negative terms, etc. It would be interesting if this was only about “exact phrase” matches and trademarks, but it seems a bit more complicated than that at an initial scan. Please correct me if I misinterpreted the findings though.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - schemester 3y ago
    The FTC doesn’t have that power.
  - vkou 3y ago
    How is it trademark violation to put up, say, Toyota billboards around the Honda dealership? Advertise the NYT in the Washington Post? Have a big freakin' Coke banner at the end of the soda aisle? Yes, this kind of advertising is a stupid zero-sum game, but our society in general, and free markets in particular have a lot of stupid zero-sum games. I see no reason why this one should be illegal.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Would Google let you target ads against its own properties?
      - jonas21 3y ago
        Uh, yes? When I search for "google cloud", I see an ad for Azure. When I search for "pixel 7", I get ads for Verizon and T-Mobile.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        I get a sponsored link for Google Cloud. And when I search for Google Pixel, I get a banner with 7 pictures and a shopping link and another link to buy a Pixel. Of course, by default I have an Ad blocker on iOS and I don’t see any ads
      - brookst 3y ago
        Why does that matter? If a Toyota dealership owns the nearby land and sells billboards, they have no obligation to sell to a competitor. People keep wanting law to work like math, and it just doesn’t. Context matters.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Google could probably get into antitrust trouble if they were too aggressive about this.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    I mean if your site is trying to deceive visitors then sure. If I search for Nike and I get an ad for N1ke.com then yeah that's bad. But if I search for Nike and I see an ad for Adidas and I proceed to buy Adidas shoes then I guess I didn't really want Nike that much to begin with?
    - harry8 3y ago
      But 99.999% of the time someone searching for jkl corp, gets and ad for jkl corp that jkl corp paid for and clicks it because it's at the top of the results. It's PURE google protection racket money paid by jkl corp so it gets the traffic of people who want to visit jkl corp. Mafia as business model is one of the many evils that google does and is.
      - bagacrap 3y ago
        Jkl corp doesn't have to buy ads. Users will still be able to find it via Google. I challenge you to find a company for which its site is not discoverable via Google search. If users who really want to go to jkl corp actually can't find it via Google, then they'll probably stop relying on Google to find things.
        harry8 3y ago
        There are examples given in this very thread of people being conned by clicking the top link which was an ad interposed by google when someone was trying to get the website of their bank.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        But that's because of the phishing aspect. If a search for "Chase mortgages" leads me to Bank of America mortgages through an ad, there's no deception going on.
        harry8 3y ago
        so why do you think companies buy their own trade marked brands as keywords so that they can pay google for their organic traffic? Because they're idiots? Why do you think google moved the ads from the side where they were clearly marked and obviously not search results to the top of the search results and made it much harder to tell "this link is actually an ad"? I mean obviously for money but why do you think it made them money? What do you think of google's plans to offer deep discounts to advertisers for traffic from keyword searches for their brand or corporate identity? Reasonable?
  - srcreigh 3y ago
    It's not extortion when the search is for Y product and the customer only knows about X brand.
- MaxGabriel 3y ago
  It’s also a huge vector for actual phishing, especially because google ads doesn’t use puny code, so it’s easy to buy ads for sites that differ by just a diacritic
  - knodi123 3y ago
    That's how my stepdad got hacked. He didn't understand bookmarks or urls or homepages, so he just opened his browser at google.com, searched for the name of his bank, clicked the first ad, and went to log in. Usually that worked for him, but once, he got a scam site, and he was on the phone with a call center in India giving them remote desktop access before a single alarm bell went off in his head. Granted, it's partly my fault for letting a loved one be that computer un-savvy, but that kind of ad should have been detected and blocked before it was ever served.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - whoisthemachine 3y ago
      It's not your fault at all, it's not on you to un-deceive your family members, it's on Google to not deceive in the first place.
      - shortcake27 3y ago
        Agreed. There are so many failures on Google’s end to let this happen. One of which was allowing the advertiser to display a legitimate URL in the ad while redirecting to an illegitimate one. I really hope this isn’t the case any more.
      - quickthrower2 3y ago
        Surely he can sue Google.
- tomrod 3y ago
  Nah, unless the competing firm is violating trademark the ROI on those types of ads are abysmal.
- duped 3y ago
  It's not borderline, it is phishing.
jahewson 3y ago
> bids with specific intent for your site should at least cost less than bids for queries for products in your industry They do. Your own brand name has a higher Quality Score against your own ads thus lower CPC.
thejosh 3y ago
This should be honestly a top priority, and has never been. For specific place names, it's super annoying. Especially for products -- Worst case is when I looked earlier there is STILL MALWARE on Bing for searches like "google chrome".
slushh 3y ago
What is preventing customer acquisition costs from eating almost all profits? Why should a company not bit for every potential customer up to their potential profits if only to benefit from increased scale? What's the endgame? Companies can only reduce ad expenses if they have monopolies or agreements among themselves.
bagels 3y ago
Yeah, I never understood how that isn't seen as a protection racket by Google.
sp0rk 3y ago
This is such an egregious attempt at fraud that I actually feel bad enough to scroll past the ads, when I'm searching for a particular company or website by name, and always make sure to click the actual search result. I really should not care about a large corporation paying a few cents to get me to their website, but it is so unnecessarily unfair on Google's part that it bothers me greatly.

RadixDLT 3y ago

Well, you know what they say - "A penny saved is a penny earned...by us!"

ovao 3y ago
This anecdote is largely irrelevant, since by virtue of the way Google positions ads in search results, it’s fair to assume that you’re simply the exception.
- jeremykerr 3y ago
  Not even the exception, in the best case something like 1-2% of users click adds on average. The median user won't interact with them, advertising isn't for the median user. It's also fair to say this topic is explicitly focused on ads, therefore on people who would click on ads.
  - rjh29 3y ago
    The average computer user literally does not even notice the 'Sponsored' tag on google or amazon search results.
    - vkou 3y ago
      No, they probably can't find the 'sponsored' text, but they are also conditioned to know that the stuff at the top and the stuff on the side is probably ads, because every friggin website on the internet has ads in those locations.
      - aeyes 3y ago
        Sometimes I get the result I am looking for in the top ad, why wouldn't I click on it? It's mostly companies which buy ads for their own brand names, for example if I search for Nike all the ads are from the official store or website. On mobile the first ad almost fills the whole screen so I'm not going to waste time scrolling further.
    - 3y ago

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago

Thought experiment. X costs you 100. A person tells you they'll sell you a service to allow you to buy X for 90. How much would you pay for that service? You'd pay up to 10, which the person then pockets. That happens because the person has to competition, so knowing that X costs 100 and you're getting it for 90, they'll charge you 10. That's google. They don't have competition in search.

powera 3y ago

For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. This applies double when you are buying ads for your company's name: you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying! But people still do it, presumably on the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" theory.

vkou 3y ago
If you weren't paying for a search for your company name, your competitors would be paying to have their ads displayed on a search for your company name. All the major ad networks let you run all sorts of comparisons and experiments for ad ROI. If ROI was routinely negative, the billion-dollar budgets would have long been pulled back by beancounters and cost-cutters in the buying firms, especially when they have the excuse of a recession to do so. Yes, occasionally you get 'I run a boutique business and I find that <X advertising system has horrible ROI>' blog posts on HN. Maybe they are structuring their ad campaigns wrong. Maybe their business shouldn't be advertised at all. Maybe they are using the wrong channel (Search, display, social) to advertise with. It's a pain in the ass to figure this out if you're a small business. But larger businesses with serious ad devote a lot of effort to figuring this out - and will reshuffle their marketing budgets to the high ROI channels.
kccqzy 3y ago
> you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying! No you won't. For power users who use ad blockers or can recognize ads, maybe you will. For the majority of users those are lost clicks. (Also those are the easiest money Google can make.)
Gustomaximus 3y ago
> For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. Is that true? I've been in this game for quite a while now and the cast majority of business have ROI positive ads. I haven't kept record but would think 8/10 businesses type ratio.
justapassenger 3y ago
> For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. This applies double when you are buying ads for your company's name: you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying! Source? It’s always extremely funny to read engineers on hacker news to make claims about ads, with no understanding of how the business work. And the underlying assumption that companies throw away billions of dollars away, with no results to show for it.

Gustomaximus 3y ago

This article is correct in the lack of transparency is concerning, but the simplify eneed view is incorrect IMO. "I think Google Ads should be simpler to use (dumb it down), should be more transparent with its costs and bids, and should offer more options to control ad appearance" Firstly, more options won't simplify most likely. Secondly google has been 'simplifying' for a long time, to their advantage. Increasingly Google push people down the performance/CPA path saying our smart systems will get you the best results 'believe us we're Google' but it's mostly not true. The best results are often from a manual as possible campaign and they make this an ever harder option to take. There needs to be far better regulation here. Marketing is one of those skills where art meets science. If you let the algorithms take over they'll often look good at a base metric but as soon as you dig around you find you're sacrificing wider goals or mostly getting sales you would have anyway, or paying crazy amounts to finish off the budget type etc. Google is a great advertising platform, but adding your money, limited controls and trusting google systems to work it out is a horrible way, and something I see all too often. I suspect it's largely because you can spend an < an hour setting the easy way, or spend a day or more setting up a well researched and manual way, but on both client/agency side people don't want to spend the time/money getting foundations right, or simply have the time or aptitude. I say the best thing is for some regulator body to go over the system changes over the years and ask why features plus analytics were removed, hidden or changed and put rules about these controls and ongoing changes to live up to the level playing field tenent of good capitalism. Maybe it is happening somewhere but I haven't seen it, and it is long overdue.

flokie 3y ago
Would respectfully disagree. Matching a consumers query to an ad, and optimizing that outcome at a given return on investment threshold is a task best left to a computer to optimize. It is a perfect use case for reinforcement learning, and a computer can work 24 hours a day and you need to sleep. In my experience, 100/100 times the machine beats the confident manual optimizer. We (humans) don't have a great track record in beating computers at these kinds of problems, certainly not a game as simple as optimizing for a high score (driving results from an ad).
- 3y ago

pcurve 3y ago

Majority of advertisers on Google lose money. "According to a study, 40 percent of small business owners stated that their Google Ads campaign yielded no leads. Whereas, an additional 33% of business owners noted that these campaigns produced very few leads." I've worked at large companies and every single one of them saw negative returns on their campaigns. It's a big wealth transfer mechanism.

whimsicalism 3y ago
It's very easy to run incrementality studies and you should be doing this if you are a large company.
chrismarlow9 3y ago
You have to optimize and test constantly for AdWords to pay off (disable content network advertising, geographic targeting on a schedule that follows the sun, a/b testing copy) and build methods of retaining users that don't buy to eventually convert (email newsletters, add us on Facebook, sign-up for this free ebook, blah blah). My guess is small business doesn't have the time to tweak all these things. There are also small tricks about writing copy to make it economical. Social media sites have the retention mechanics built for you so I'm not surprised they convert better. Just my 2 cents as a guy who does marketing for some spare pocket change.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  Can you send me an email, or put yours in your profile?
bagacrap 3y ago
Trust me bro
cm2012 3y ago
Yep, people spend $120b a year on Google ads, crushing the old ad industry, because it doesn't work. It's just idiots in marketing departments all the way down. (I've worked with 50+ company ad accounts and any large business will have profitable campaigns at x level spend)

iamleppert 3y ago

Google’s Ad business needs to be separated from search. Search should become like any other SaaS company, providing an API to its results and charging companies who want to run ads on top of the results. Those companies would compete among themselves, offering choice and value. They could also in theory choose another search API, providing pressure on old Google to improve and focus on its search results, divorced of any conflicting pressures from trying to operate both businesses.

chupchap 3y ago
Imagine Android without a Pixel. Can you imagine the hell we would have to deal with?

harry8 3y ago

Remember when google was good and gave you "search results" as best it could instead of suggestions of things it thinks you might want? In those days the search results had a white background and appeared directly below the query input. The ads were over there on the right margin with a different background and clearly identified as ads. They used to brag about how good they were at giving you the address of something specific you were searching for with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Linux nerds used to /like/ them. No really. Nowadays they're fully compromised by both money and politics and make the old days of microsoft look good. I see things like this :https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1673783596828569606 https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/16737835968285696... From a politician I don't particularly like or support fwiw and think "How dare they?" Google are fully evil.

hattmall 3y ago
Google search is unbelievable frustrating these days. And yeah the free speech concerns are very real. There needs to be a level of critical mass for any company that deals in communications where they are held to the same standards as the government. If >25% of the population uses your company for some form of communication censorship should be prohibited but of course we seem to be rapidly moving in a vastly different direction.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  This sort of shallow minded statement always boils down to “but we should still censor the stuff I don’t like and of course I assume everyone agrees with me” Sorry but it’s obvious you’ve never worked on this issue. It’s not easy.
  - DasIch 3y ago
    It's far from shallow minded. In Germany that's actually how the law is interpreted. The theory is that under an indirect third party effect free speech becomes effectively limited, if large companies censor people. As a result they can be compelled not to do so within reason. For example, if a social media platform bans you, you can sue them and they have to show that they have sufficient reason and that they gave you opportunity to appeal etc. If they fail, they have to unban you.

eastern 3y ago

If one just rewrites that headline as 'Google does little to reduce its own revenue' it all becomes much clearer.

dbg31415 3y ago

Shocking that a company without any real competition that cares about its stock price doesn't go out of its way to lower profits. Shocking. I'm shocked.

onion2k 3y ago

A noticeable trend in ecommerce over the past year or two is sites adding a "Why not use our app?" popup modal or banner when you hit the site or you add something to a cart. This is directly related to search ad costs. Companies are trying to reduce their reliance on search engines to drive traffic because customer acquisition costs are crazy high while the average customer spend is falling. At some point it stops being worth capturing the customer with a search ad. This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks.

mattbee 3y ago
This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks. When my business was new in 2003, and Google Ads too, we had a competitor bid on our name as a search term. We were outraged and found that Google had a page on, I think abusive search terms or something? But to action anything you had to write a letter to Mountain View. So we did that, citing deceptive practices or some pseudo-legal rubbish. And they actioned it! For years afterwards we saw no ads on our little UK company's name.
- pjc50 3y ago
  I wonder if they actioned it globally or just to UK IP addresses? The UK has the ASA, so adverts aren't totally unregulated here and it's not a fraud free-for-all.
  - mattbee 3y ago
    I like to imagine someone opened the letter, rolled their eyes, opened "BadKeywords.txt", added our company name and binned it.

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Alternative title: "Google does very little to minimize their profits"

amelius 3y ago

Ads are just another kind of tax. Eventually everybody pays for it as it is a part of the cost price of every product. Google's aim is to make us pay the highest possible tax. Ads should be free (but limited in the way they distract us). The most important reason is that we want the market to reward the best product, not the one with the biggest advertising budget.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Ads should be against the law. :)
charcircuit 3y ago
Advertising space is scarce so you need to find a fair where to choose who gets it.
- amelius 3y ago
  No, we just need something like Yellow Pages where consumers can take a look whenever they want to be informed about new products. We must stop the vicious cycle of producers having to pay higher and higher prices to get attention (which is what Google loves). And we certainly don't want ads everywhere because we don't want to drive up global consumption unnecessarily.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    That would hurt so many businesses. People might not even know that your product exists or that they are potentially interested in your product until you advertise it. This means that small businesses are hurt because no one knows to look them up and no one knows them because their brand is weak. Ad space prices don't go higher and higher. It is auctioned off. If demand for the space goes down then the price will also go down.
    - amelius 3y ago
      I don't think so. If you want to actively find stuff there are ways to do it, like going to a tech show near you. Businesses survived before advertising was as crazy as it is today, so we can tune it down a _lot_ before bad things start happening to businesses in general.

seydor 3y ago

probably because advertisers did not care google is in the business of dashboards. as long as they can show that their spending does "something", advertisers are good

someonewhocar3s 3y ago

[dead]

pulse7 3y ago

Google search results became unusable. We need a new search engine now, which would provide good results - like the old Google...

majani 3y ago
Impossible since most scrapers that aren't Googlebot are viewed with suspicion by hosting and security companies.

GoToRO 3y ago

This was specifically forbiden by Google eons ago. You could not create an ad with Pepsi in it, unless you were Pepsi. What we have today is intentional, they have the system to prevent this but they choose to no longer use it. It might be that your own ad with your own brand in it is way cheaper than the competitors ads with your brand in them. Maybe they just want some money from you even when the user searched for your brand specifically. Maybe they want to train users to always click on ads (hard no to when the ad is exactlly what you searched for)

LatteLazy 3y ago

If only they'd cut advertiser's costs, we could have more advertising. And that would also be cheaper, pushier, advertising. And it would be a pity that there was a lot less cash then for things like actual content, but the important thing is to maximise the number of adverts right? Right?

glimshe 3y ago

Duh... Monopolist does nothing to reduce their profits? Why would we expect otherwise?