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I'm kinda surprised they don't have some human/AI combination that estimates how much profit you are earning from Google Ads, and charge most of that. The whol

I'm kinda surprised they don't have some human/AI combination that estimates how much profit you are earning from Google Ads, and charge most of that. The whole idea of having a price for each individual impression seems outdated - what businesses care about is "how much did we pay Google this month, and how many widgets did we sell, and was it worth it or should we advertise elsewhere?". Therefore, why bother with the middle man - just make an algorithm to predict exactly how much the business thinks the ads are worth.

discmonkey 3y ago
They do have this, you can choose to bid for a target conversion cost (I want to pay at most $x per conversion). In general I find all of this pretty silly as a Google employee.. I don't think you can distill the complexity of any change down to one article. Say for example that Google did just raise how much advertisers paid per click across the board, why would that lead to billions of dollars in profit? I would bet that the majority of advertisers on Google already spend their whole budget, so that would mean that now they would just be getting less clicks and conversions per dollar of budget spend. Logically they would then move some of this budget to other advertising channels such as Facebook. Charging more per impression always has second order effects, but who cares about that on hackernews
- deleted 3y ago
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- londons_explore 3y ago
  Of course - pricing is a maximization game. But thats why modelling businesses has such a large opportunity. Some businesses will be prepared to pay more if you send them more conversions... Others have a fixed budget. Some use many platforms, and certain things might persuade them to move more budget to you. Some might be persuaded by "tricks" like handing out airmiles, vouchers or free stuff to the marketing team in return for ad spend. All of those things require a higher level strategy than just doing everything per-impression.

discmonkey 3y ago

They do have this, you can choose to bid for a target conversion cost (I want to pay at most $x per conversion). In general I find all of this pretty silly as a Google employee.. I don't think you can distill the complexity of any change down to one article. Say for example that Google did just raise how much advertisers paid per click across the board, why would that lead to billions of dollars in profit? I would bet that the majority of advertisers on Google already spend their whole budget, so that would mean that now they would just be getting less clicks and conversions per dollar of budget spend. Logically they would then move some of this budget to other advertising channels such as Facebook. Charging more per impression always has second order effects, but who cares about that on hackernews

deleted 3y ago
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londons_explore 3y ago
Of course - pricing is a maximization game. But thats why modelling businesses has such a large opportunity. Some businesses will be prepared to pay more if you send them more conversions... Others have a fixed budget. Some use many platforms, and certain things might persuade them to move more budget to you. Some might be persuaded by "tricks" like handing out airmiles, vouchers or free stuff to the marketing team in return for ad spend. All of those things require a higher level strategy than just doing everything per-impression.