Google is a massive corporation with 135,000 employees (excluding contractors), so how on Earth could it be running on auto pilot?
I want to focus on only one product, Google Ads, without which Google would not exist. In 2011 it accounted for 96% of Google’s revenue, and 83% today.
It is no secret that Google is slowly but surely turning the Google Ads platform into an automated offering. In the future Google will scan your website and make your ads for you — all you do is pay for the ad clicks. An easier to use service should equate to more users, although marketing agencies are concerned they will have less work to do in this area. And a more automated solution should require less support, which will increase profits for Google.
Support, or the lack of it at Google Ads, is already a major problem, although the general public is unaware. Perhaps the most successful single product of all time is being neglected by its owners, who are seemingly disinterested in providing a reasonable level of support, despite having $132 billion sitting in the bank.
Prompting me the write this is a recent experience. I manage the ads for a large technology firm as part of my role in an agency. This client has 400K customers and has no connection with the gambling industry at all. Yet their ads were disapproved for “online gambling”.
In any other business on the planet, when a customer who spends six-figures per month with you, phones with a problem, you jump through hoops to fix it. Not Google. Instead, a low-level support person says they will pass it on to the appropriate team, and they will get back to me. Two days later, not a word — meanwhile ads are not running and the client is losing revenue.
Prior to the pandemic, Google stopped having local support staff in Australia. It is now all or at least primarily based in India. While they are typically very polite and can help with basic problems, mostly they just escalate your case to a team you can never have direct contact with. With that comes the usual problems that occur when you cannot talk directly to the person who actually understands the issue. It is like telling the receptionist at an auto mechanic what the problem is, instead of the person who will actually fix your car.
Since the pandemic has hit, the support for Google Ads has been woeful. They have seemingly been unable to transfer their systems to a WFH environment. In the past, when the lowest level of support is being unhelpful, I could (with great effort) speak to their supervisor. I am told that this is no longer possible.
Issues that were typically resolved in one day now often take a week. In some cases, support literally gives up on you and ignores your emails. The company famous for having so many staff with PhDs can’t (or won’t) fix their support issues a year into the pandemic. It could be worse — at the start of the pandemic support pretty much went AWOL for a whole week.
Lack of proper support is mighty confusing. It couldn’t or shouldn’t be to save money, and it couldn’t or shouldn’t be a deliberate ploy to drive customers away. But it could be due their monopoly situation, and it could be a very strange test…
Regarding the monopoly — while in most Western markets Google has over 90% of the search market, it wouldn’t matter if it was much lower. Advertisers want to reach everyone showing an interest in their line of product or service via a search engine. If Google had a competitor who had 50% of the market share, advertisers wouldn’t choose between one or the other, they’d advertise on both. We are basically forced to advertise on Google to keep up with our competitors, so leaving the platform due to poor service is not an option. Which means Google doesn’t need to try. They put all their effort into getting more revenue from advertisers, and very little into providing good service.
It could be a bizarre, long-term experiment into seeing how poor their support can get before advertisers leave.
A lot of support is for people simply trying to use the platform, for example “why aren’t my ads showing?”. Google tries to triage this through help files and an online community where unpaid volunteers give advice. Strange days indeed where Google lets non-employees help their customers. But if you persist you can online chat or email the support people. If you are lucky, phone support is also available, but in the pandemic era this is rare.
However lots of support needs are caused by Google. They have a myriad of vaguely worded policies that most advertisers are unaware of, and when they are hit with an ad disapproval, they typically need support to explain it to them.
Now for the auto-pilot part!
While Google uses humans to check videos on YouTube (often causing trauma), primarily ad policy compliance is done using machine learning and bots. The bots look for trigger words on your website, and machine learning decides that certain combinations suggest non-compliance. For my client that simply means that in their terms and conditions they say their product cannot be used for online gambling. Google’s machine learning sees “online gambling” on that page and decides they are a gambling company. It is called machine learning and not artificial intelligence for good reason. Google’s system does not understand context. If you say “we do not guarantee”, Google thinks you are guaranteeing something.
If the ads don’t run for a few days — presuming Google will fix this for us — that is an expensive annoyance. But many advertisers suffer much more than that — they get permanently banned from advertising.
Serious policy violations lead to an account suspension. Google tells you by email the general policy concerned, but not the specifics involved. If you can contact them (often suspended accounts can’t), they won’t tell you the specifics. You can appeal the decision, but if you don’t know what you did wrong, an appeal simply won’t work.
A very common reason for suspensions is Circumventing Systems, and the most common reason is opening more than one Google Ads account. There is no policy that says this is not allowed, however there is this:
promoting the same or similar content from multiple accounts on the same or similar queries
In reality, simply operating two accounts and having the potential to violate that policy gets you suspended.
If Google knows it is you operating two accounts, they could easily simply recognise you when you go to open a second account, and tell you not to. That would be a reasonable solution that a tech-savvy business could engineer. They don’t. Instead they suspend your accounts forever, don’t telly you why, and your ability to reach 90% of the search market is gone. This can and does cripple businesses who made a simple mistake.
The trend is clear. Google aims to automate ad campaigns, automate policy enforcement and remove all paid humans from support. The only staff they will need are those who conjure up ways of increasing revenue from exisiting advertisers. If you were wondering if Google removed their “don’t do evil” motto for a reason, consider this, which is just one of their tricks:
By default, your ads can show to people in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your targeted locations.
This sounds sensible with the example provided:
For example, if you own a bakery in Paris and choose Paris as a targeted location, your ads can show to people located or regularly in Paris, or to people who have expressed interest in Paris bakeries (now or in the past).
In reality, only a fraction of a percent of businesses benefit from such targeting. And it is a default, buried deep in campaign settings, that 90% of small advertisers are unaware of. The reality is that you get lots of clicks from overseas, that you pay for, that are of no use to you. 10% of your ad clicks is common. When you are a local plumber paying $30 per click, those clicks from India can add up.
Google used to have a report that at least showed you the locations of people who clicked on your ad, although few advertisers knew it existed. Recently, Google simply removed it. While finding the information is still possible, you have to customise reports to achieve it, making the information very obscure.
Google deliberately, by default, serves ads for your small local business to people overseas, without you electing to do so, or knowing. And the removal of the report, which perhaps increases revenue by 0.1%, is an example something that the remaining humans will think up.
It feels like Google is actually run by a machine, who has a primary purpose of making profits, regardless of the collateral damage caused by ruining some businesses. It feels like humans are an annoyance.
To sum up, these are the major problems I see with today:
- Search marketing is a utility that many businesses depend on. Just like water and electricity, Google should not be allowed to deny you that service without fair and proper processes
- Machine learning should not make account decisions without human oversight. Disapproving ads or suspending accounts based on a word somewhere on your website is the opposite of intelligence
- Given how many businesses are being ripped off by Google Ads’ many defaults that exist only to benefit Google, public awareness would be welcomed. Traditional media, who should hate Google any way, should step up
