Is Advertisers’ Trust in Google Irrevocably Broken?
Discover why advertisers are shifting their focus away from Google.
Tyler Jordan, the Founder and CEO of Jordan Digital Marketing, points out that Google’s lack of transparency regarding the future of search is jeopardizing advertisers’ trust and could have long-lasting consequences.
A YouTube placement controversy. Unsavory revelations about auction price gaming in an ugly antitrust trial. Most recently, an Analytics report revealed Google Search Partner ads placed on controversial – and sometimes pornographic – sites without advertiser knowledge or consent.
Put simply, 2023 has not been Google’s finest year.
Specifically, it hasn’t been Google’s most trustworthy year. A media giant and advertising partner once leading with the proud motto of “Don’t Be Evil” (which, according to multiple reports, disappeared from the company’s code of conduct in 2018) and happy to watch from the sidelines as Facebook took well-deserved PR lumps is now squarely in advertisers’ skeptical crosshairs.
I’ve worked in digital marketing since 2010, and it’s no exaggeration to say that most of my career has been built on the foundation of Google ads. Today, I run an agency that grows B2C and B2B/SaaS brands and counts as a competitive differentiator in our strength in running profitable Google campaigns for our clients. I owe Google a lot – and I’ve never trusted them less.
This post will look at three big 2023 stories that have eroded my trust in Google, starting with the Adlytics report and working backward. I’ll also explain why Google’s hard lean into AI-fueled marketing compounds the trust issue by taking away the ability for advertisers to do our jobs – namely, use our expertise to find potential customers as efficiently as possible.
Let’s kick off with…
The Adalytics Search Partners Broadside
In November 2023, Adalytics published a blockbuster report (with plenty of receipts) showing the Google Search Partners (GSP) network, a multi-billion-dollar yearly revenue-maker for Google. GSP extends Google Search Ads’ reach to non-Google sites that have search functionality, but some of them turned out to be extremely controversial and, in some cases, even pornographic. Worse, this was happening without the consent or knowledge of brands placing the ads – and was even happening on sites that the brands had specifically placed on targeting exclusion lists.
Google fired back, of course, saying that Adalytics was exaggerating things. Yet this week, Adweek reported that Google very coincidentally just decided to let advertisers opt out of the GSP placements altogether until March 1.
There’s a lot to process there, and none of it looks good for Google. I’ll add one more layer: advertisers can opt out of GSP for search and shopping campaigns, even though they need to go in and undo the default opt-in setting to do it. But until Google threw everyone a bone with the universal opt-out option, they were automatically included in GSP placements for PerformanceMax and Universal App Campaigns – both of which offer advertisers very limited control of and visibility into placements. So basically, advertising on those very large campaign types being aggressively promoted by Google meant that advertisers were trusting Google to serve their ads where they’d a) find the right users and b) respect brand integrity.
Many agency owners I know, and respect follow our rule of thumb with Search Partners: We generally recommend that our clients stay away because of the lack of visibility into placements unless they are desperate for additional volume at reduced efficiency. This report isn’t all that surprising, especially in the wake of other recent insights into Google’s inner workings, but it’s certainly more reason to be disappointed.
YouTube Placement Fraud
Adalytics had already taken Google to task earlier in 2023, with a report showing that for the past three years, YouTube’s TrueView skippable in-stream ads weren’t shown where they were supposed to be shown and weren’t behaving as they were supposed to behave, even according to Google’s own policies. After issuing the expected statements arguing Adalytics’ findings and getting hit with a class-action lawsuit, Google decided to rename the ad types “to more accurately describe the ad format.”
See More: How to Gain Fraud Intelligence by Re-examining Relationship with Data
Antitrust Admissions
Way back in January 2023, the DoJ kicked off Google’s year on the wrong foot by opening a federal antitrust lawsuit claiming that Google was illegally monopolizing the ad tech market. This had been running along relatively quietly in the background for most of the year – until September when then-VP of Ads Jerry Dischler admitted on the stand that Google has a practice of gaming auction prices. (Dischler, by the way, resigned from Google in late November.)
Again, this is something advertisers have suspected for years, but to see the admission laid out so starkly was proof positive that Google is willing to put its shareholders’ interests above transparency and honesty to its customers.
Black-Box Advertising
As recently as a few years ago, Google search advertisers had plenty of control in using advanced techniques for bidding and targeting. Match types were still important and carried clear distinctions that allowed advertisers to be strategic about targeting keywords by the level of purchasing intent they carried – which is essentially the unique power of search to begin with.
Now, match types are blurry, with no clear definition on record. Google is pushing advertisers hard (as described above) toward AI-powered campaign types with limited visibility into where ads are being shown.
In a vacuum, with no other nefarious headlines, this has been frustrating for experienced marketers, who have fewer levers to pull to set up sophisticated, higher-performing campaigns. Given the context of the above reports, the idea of Google basically advising advertisers to fork over their budgets and let Google spend them as they see fit is even less appealing.
All in all, it’s hard for me to believe that this is the same media company that once served as a great partner for innovative marketers looking for creative ways to find pockets of performance.
So What Now?
Short of any aggressively punitive antitrust fallout, or Microsoft revolutionizing Bing results (given that it’s even more gung-ho about AI than Google, I’m not optimistic) or TikTok extending its search tentacles from Gen Z into older and more professional-focused audiences, Google is where the search action is going to be for the foreseeable future in most industries. The Google-Facebook advertising duopoly, which in 2022 combined for less than 50% of total online advertising spend for the first time since 2014, may have eroded a little, but it’s still holding very strong (it made up 48% of total online ad spend in 2022). This means that from a business perspective, Google can keep on treating advertisers’ trust without much care.
That said, sentiment matters. Advertisers are Google’s lifeblood. The more reasons Google and its (hungrier, more cooperative) competitors give us to send our budget elsewhere, the more we’ll seize on those opportunities. If Google continues in this direction, it won’t take much more for advertisers’ trust to be broken beyond repair, which means that the only thing left keeping Google from a huge revenue loss will be a competitor (or group of competitors) offering any kind of viable alternative.
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