How Google harms search advertisers in 20 slides

"I would describe it less as raising prices and more coming up with better prices or more fair prices where those new prices are higher than the previous ones."

More "fair" for Google.

And, "momiji" [0] describes the (closely tracked) seasonal phenomena in Japan when tree foliage turn a brilliant red during Autumn.

[0] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/紅葉

Anyone who has managed ads with performance in mind will be familiar with their tactics. (My post history on HN includes plenty of complaints like neutering reporting, organic search quality and how they essentially extort brands via brand trademark bidding.)

The 3 components that make up quality score: ad relevance, landing page quality and clickthrough rate are a black box. You can have ads and landing pages that match specific keywords (such as in a single keyword ad group strategy) and still have 1/10 scores on ad relevance and landing page and an insane CTR (think 40%+). You can look at search competition reports, but in some niches with few participants (think very specialized manufacturing equipment) you end up with the same <5 participants for years, yet the effective ad costs increase every quarter/year. Google adjusts bid floors for auctions, even if there isn't really upward pressure resulting from an increase in number of advertisers or participant bids.

Related to this-- their goal is always to increase the number of participants in every auction. The ad fill rate is easily improved by loosening match types. It isn't just the SEO space that Google has been redefining words in-- they do the same with keywords and match types. For example, "cheap textbook", "cheap textbooks" and "cheapest textbooks" are 3 distinct queries with widely varying CTRs and conversion rates, and hence values to advertisers-- but even when using exact match, Google may give you any one of the examples when you specify which one you prefer as an exact match.

Most infuriatingly is how you don't 100% know what you are paying for-- even when you explicitly specify what you want. Anyone who has looked at the search queries report can attest that sometimes 50%+ (emphasis on the insanity! I have observed this on $x,xxx,xxx/yr spend accounts all the way to my own personal campaigns) of ad spend for search ads, where you are explicitly saying I want to show for these specific keywords, is bucketed in the "Total: Other search terms" row. *It did not used to behave this way.* Negative match keywords are less aggressive in what is excluded relative to their exact/(phrase)/broad modified equivalents. This entirely ignores concepts like Google Shopping Ads requiring constant negative matching of longtail keywords (including for terms that you can't even really discover) that are all super small amounts individually, but in aggregate can be ludicrous amounts of spend that is essentially impossible to block for less sophisticated advertisers.

Every incremental change by Google seems to be to make the quality worse for the end user-- whether they are the searcher getting worse results or* the advertiser being goaded into wasting money on things Google isn't accurately presenting.* Specialty publications like Search Engine Land covered large things like the changes in second price auctions, display going to first price and match types-- but they typically aren't super critical, because a handful of Google's organic search "liaisons" are hires from industry publications.