Each time you type in a keyword in Google and you push the enter button, an auction happens. This means that billions of auctions happen on Google’s website every month. Wondering how this works, and how you can enter in one of the auctions?
To bid in one of the auctions you need a Google Ads account, in which you can specify certain keywords you want to bid on when someone Googles it. You might assume that the highest bidder will get the first position in the search results. However, nothing is less true.
Even when you are the highest bidder, you don’t always end up getting the first position. Your position depends on two things: Your bid, and your quality score. Google created a Quality Score to make sure the search results are as relevant as possible for the people performing search queries. Eventually, we as consumers of the search engine want the most relevant results as possible. The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll see higher Quality Scores. Don’t want to waste time creating the best ads yourself? Just let Google’s machine learning do it for you! Simply provide up to 15 headlines and 4 description lines, and Google will do the rest. By testing different combinations, Google learns which ad performs best for any search query. So people searching for the same thing might see slightly different ads.
With the recent rebranding of Google Adwords to Google Ads, Google also implemented a completely new interface. Together with the easier to use interface, a lot of new features were launched. You can now for example add more headlines and descriptions to your add to even further improve your quality score.
With a revenue of 95.4 billion US dollars in 2017 compared to 79.4 in 2016, Google ads will be around for a while. I’m excited for what the future has to offer!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/07/10/google-marketing-live
https://www.blog.google/products/ads/
https://www.blog.google/technology/ads/machine-learning-hands-advertisers/
Great contribution Scott! Very helpful to get another insights in Google Ads after it has also been discussed, although you were even earlier with your blog.
I won’t get into the Google ads themselves as they have already been discussed during the lecture. However, I did not know that machine learning was implemented. Interesting to see what machine learning is capable of. But what I then worry about is the fact that machine learning can produce biased results, being it intended or unintended. Do you think that in someway Google can bias the results to come up with slightly more expensive keywords?
Hi Scott, thank you for the blog post – interesting read.
When I first heard of Google Ads and how it works, I was immediately wondered what the real life applications of this method would be. How would a bakery look if they’d not sell the breads for a fixed price, but base it on the customers Willingness to Pay, in combination with how much a customer ‘deserves’ that bread? This would be a bit of an extreme example, but for certain scarcer goods it might be an interesting approach.