Google’s making things harder…why?
Recently we’ve seen lawmakers from both parties — people who wouldn’t agree on the color of the sky — join forces to propose how to regulate big tech. As the public, the experts, and even the platforms themselves support regulation (to avoid anti-trust action?), it seems like an odd time for Google, generally the platform most critical for digital marketing success, to piss off the digital marketing community. After 20+ years of developing and delivering industry-leading digital marketing products — what gives?
Well, it might just be bad timing. This year Google is facing a double threat to its popularity: A disruptive technology (generative AI…duh) to its cash-cow search engine advertising business AND changes (long-planned) to its digital products to address privacy concerns (sunsetting third party cookie data; replacing Universal Analytics with GA4). The result for digital marketers? Google’s Bard generative AI search experience pushing ‘traditional’ search engine results (ads and organic listings) further down the page, arguably watering-down visibility and performance. Grrr. And Google’s updates to digital marketing products forcing marketers to change platforms, processes, and tools that were useful — and that worked! They’re making us use their ‘auto-tagging’ ad tracking, taking away our ‘similar’ audiences feature, and jamming a new ‘event-based’ analytics platform that requires us to learn a trickier set of tools and dig into our website code to instrument some tracking features correctly). Double and triple grrr. That’s why digital marketers like me are finding ourselves rooting for Microsoft (an unusual thing, trust me).
There’s a bit of delicious irony to Google’s growth over the past 20 years, and to its current situation, irking the digital marketing community even as it innovates. At the start, Google’s founders wanted to serve people and address the bias of advertiser-funded search. Which was very cool, led to a superior user experience, the trust in its results, and serious money — even as ads drove this growth. As it scaled, Google’s relentless focus on the user experience drove improvements to digital content, but simultaneously drove issues related to ad placements — brand safety — where Google simply admitted that it couldn’t solve the issue (even as it charged advertisers more for the effort…). Ultimately, digital marketers will have to ‘suck it up’ and adjust to Google’s new products and directives — free analytics products, even if a pain in the ass to set up and master, are still free and industry standard. And 90%+ share of search engine activity can absorb an AI-led threat (plenty of room to lose some share and retain ‘800 lb. gorilla’ status with digital marketers looking to identify audiences for advertising and content marketing initiatives).
Looking past the current grumbling about Google’s recent moves impacting digital marketers, it’s worth remembering that Google’s actions appear (to this digital marketer at least) to be a good faith effort to preserve profits while being more sensitive to the very real data privacy concerns that big tech (and the digital marketing industry that depends on big tech) has yet to address in any systematic fashion. And so, Google will make things a bit harder for us…and this is only the beginning…
