What advertisers can expect from Google

I am humbled.

I thought, hey, it would be cool to publish a newsletter here on LinkedIn every week on media buying strategies.

And 860 people decided to subscribe.

If you are one of them, thank you, I appreciate you.

So, why the crystal ball image in the headline Jim?

Coming up on May 24th is the 2022 edition of Google Marketing Live .

I've been working as a partner of Google's for a considerable time (more than 20 years).

My time as a media buyer on their platform pre-dates Google Adwords, even the CPM version of it.

I was "begged" by Google in the UK to spend some of my clients money on their new platform when they launched Adwords back in 2001.

Back then, Google offered agencies a 15% discount on the media spend.

They had to, they were competing with TV, radio and print, all of which offered agencies a 15% discount on media spend.

They offered agencies net 30 terms to pay the media bill.

I regularly cut Google a check for over $1,000,000 a month.

If you've ever written and signed a check for that amount of money the first time is very weird...

Back then they didn't have much of a presence.

The office was a two person office in the basement of a service office building in central London.

Google needed agencies. Agencies didn't need Google, but they were being made aware of how good organic Google was, so it made sense to try it.

Good media buyers try every platform

Google used to throw amazing parties that senior Googlers attended.

Google had events where they would break news of upcoming betas, changes to the way in which the relationship with agencies was going to work and other important changes.

The events were in person, so it was a great opportunity to meet your peer group.

Back then, it was a smaller group of agency owners.

Those events were the equivalent of what is now the Google Marketing Live event.

Pre-IPO Googlers were amazing.

Post-IPO Googlers were much more cautious, prescriptive.

Back in 2006 at the GML equivalent event, the then director of sales broke the news that to make it fair for all agencies, they were taking away the agency discount of 15%.

They were replacing it with something known as "best practise funding" which was up to 8% kickback, dependent on spend and subject to some hoop jumping.

That action wiped out a lot of agencies.

Those agencies were not charging clients anything over and above the agency discount.

I didn't like the practise that some agencies adopted.

Their approach to clients would be something like "hey you spend $1,000,000 a month on Adwords. If you spend it through me I will give you $75,000 a month back. You can still manage it as you do now".

Google could just as easily have given all agencies the 15% discount to make it fair for all agencies, but that would then have punished the clients who worked with Google or did everything in-house.

In the past several years, all the announcements at the Google Marketing Live have been the equivalent of a chain mail fist, wrapped in a silk glove.

Advertisers have been battered.

Agencies have been sacrificed.

Many agencies have gone bust.

New agencies are told how they should do things, what they need to be qualified, which rules are mandatory in respect of feature adoption.

Do all those things and your agency receives their "Google Partner" status.

Once a quarter you can get Google swag.

Google have tried to say that things are OK.

I tend to disagree.

I've always had a mutual "hate/hate" relationship with Google (alright maybe it's not hate, but a significant amount of scepticism), but I am old enough and wise enough to know that they need me and I need them.

They have lured advertisers in with the promise of better results, more sales, cheaper CPA, higher ROAS because of :

• Machine Learning (ML)
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Automated Changes
• Account Insights
• Optimisation Score (where you get rewarded for doing what Google want you to do)

Their algorithm is much smarter now.

Or so they say.

A human couldn't possibly beat their system right?

Yet, whenever I take over a Google Ads account and make some tweaks, that include changing back certain types of campaigns to manual CPC, without enhanced CPC, the performance is always better.

Sure, we might lose a few sales over the course of a month, but the reduction in CPA or improvement in ROAS is significant, it's just we have to do the math.

So, here are my crystal ball predictions for what we are going to get smacked with this year at Google Marketing Live next Tuesday.

I'll update you with what we actually get in next weeks newsletter and see what is different from my predictions to the actual.

Here we go then :

1. Manual CPC as a bid type will be removed.
2. Automated ad improvements will become mandatory.
3. Google will offer favourable performance to advertisers who favour Google Pay
4. Google will adopt the same model as Facebook/Meta for conversions and move to an Aggregated Event Measurement model and focus more on conversions that are secondary, rather than just conversions with money.
5. Lots more video ads and the universal availability of the Video Builder (which we have been beta testing for some time on certain accounts).
6. LOTS of talk about the results from the early pioneers of Performance Max campaigns, which is going to be the defacto campaign type from later this year.

I've never met a DTC business that could buy anything with an add to cart (ATC) conversion, yet Facebook expect advertisers to optimise for those if you are not making 50 sales a week.

I strongly suspect that Google are going to go up the events food chain to prioritise more "signal" based conversion events and then fudge the rest with delayed reporting numbers.

Advertisers and agencies would be strongly recommended to get active in setting up Conversion API and Server Side tagging as soon as possible, so not to get caught in the melee.

That's what I think is going to happen at GML.

Now this is more news that I think will impact advertisers who are using Smart Display Campaigns

RIP Smart Display Campaigns

In a cleverly worded way, Google have done away with Smart Display campaigns as we know and love them.

Why did I love them?

Well, in a nutshell, if you wanted conversions, you only paid for conversions.

If you got a ton of clicks and impressions and no conversions, you didn't pay a thing.

If you ran remarketing campaigns correctly, you could use the audience who saw these Smart Display Ads and target them with other ads.

Everyone loves free traffic.

In most cases advertisers didn't get any traffic to their Smart Display campaigns because they were unrealistic with their goals and expected more than they should have done.

If your site averages out a conversion at $50 CPA, but you set a target CPA of $2.50 for a Smart Display campaign, you'll get what you deserve, which is no traffic.

Here is the carefully worded release from Google about the changes they have made.

And here is where you can read about the changes in more detail.

My advice would be if you have any existing Smart Display campaigns running, don't touch them.

That's all I got for you this week.

Let me know what you would like to see in future newsletters and I would love to know what predictions you have for the upcoming Google Marketing Live by leaving a comment and we can meet again next week to compare notes.

I'd love to grow the audience for the newsletter.

If you know other media buyers (and let's be honest, we all do), be sure to share this newsletter so as a group we can get more media buyers involved in the conversation and help shape the identity of the industry moving forward and keep the platforms we work with on their toes and honest.

I might be naive to think we can make a difference, but who knows.