This is so obvious to everyone who has used their ad system.

They get away with that because they know marketing departments don't care - they have ad budgets to spend. Google gives them enough dashboards and excuses to satisfy their bosses. It is still unknown which half of advertising works.

> They get away with that because they know marketing departments don't care

Even if they cared, they have no leverage.

In the financial sector, any market-maker in Google's position would be heavily regulated, and the kind of shit Google pulls would land people in jail. Even without the market manipulation, there's no way a company like Google could operate without a clear separation between departments. The reason for that is that centuries of playing that game have shown that it's the only way to keep market makers honest.

It's not a two-way market really, so no real market making. One seller auctioning things of.

Google doesn't only sell their own eyeballs, they also are the de facto marketplace for other people to sell space.

Google Search Ads is a much bigger business than their other ads products.

Search ads are valuable because when you search for "best laptop 2023", googles decision of what to show will have a big determining factor whether you buy an hp, a macbook or a thinkpad.

Companies are prepared to hand over literally hundreds of dollars to persuade Google to direct you to them rather than a competitor.

Whereas most people are fairly used to ignoring banner ads, and the vast majority of ads don't lead directly to a purchase, so they tend to be worth only a few cents at most.

While true, this is in the context of the search monopoly trial. In which case they only sell their own inventory.

It's always useful to show the otherwise fraudulent nature of the business, and the moral bankruptcy of the people running it.

Inevitably some google exec will testify that they "strive to bring the best to their customers and bring a public-good service". By then, everyone will have been warned that this person is unquestionably a swindling weasel.

Is there ad space to ad space business? Interesting.

Society doesn't need an honest ad market. We do need honest security markets.

Ads being the main funding source of media, it's an essential piece of a functioning democracy.

Without decent revenue streams for quality news outlets, the alternative we're slowly heading to is "sponsored" media, with patrons such as Jeff Bezos funding papers like the WP, and distorting their ability to report news accurately, or clickbait media not contributing to news discovery.

Could also try to move to expensive subscriptions and public funding of some sort.

> This is so obvious to everyone who has used their ad system.

This. I tried once and am still a bit confused if I understood it correctly. Google seemed to refuse "too low" bids completely for no other disclosed reason than that they were too low. And the UI was hellbent to make me give google authority to bid on my behalf on googles own ad auction. Like, WTF? Who on their right mind would agree to that? I'd very much like these folks to be my customers. I guarantee, I will sell you whatever (legal) you want, as long as you agree that I can set the price to whatever I want. It just boggles my mind.

This was my reaction to it too, and that was after a few days diving pretty deep into it.

Ad attribution is difficult, but it's difficult everywhere because customer behaviour is complex. It's much easier to attribute digital ads sources than it is to attribute out of home advertising. This isn't anything Google specific.

Very true. At work, our data science team had to employ subtle methods to truly be convinced that a particular offline ad channel was ineffective: https://medium.com/qonto-way/how-to-invest-better-in-acquisi...

Hey look, it's another online-first startup reinventing media mix modelling!

(Sorry for the snark but this is a very well studied technique in the offline world that gets completely ignored by online advertisers, rather like AB testing gets mostly ignored by offline advertisers).

this is true but why does Google and all other ad-sellers provide dashboards that pretend to make it easy

Because compared to the alternatives, they significantly easier.

Attribution is arguably the biggest challenge in marketing. If you know that someone bought because of an ad you know you can spend more on that ad, if you know no one is buying from it you know not to.

With almost all digital marketing there's some amount of tracking, not necessarily of users, but of ads. When you make a sale you know which ad it came from. Now that's not perfect attribution, users might take a few views to click through, may go direct rather than clicking through, or may click through multiple different ads, but it's pretty good.

With non-digital marketing there's nearly zero information. Billboards, TV adverts, magazines, radio, even podcasts which are digital, etc. The way that attribution is done is based on times of day (did you get a spike after your TV advert aired), or it's based on location (did you get a spike in the area of the billboard). Sometimes discount codes are used for attribution (use code TUBE10 to save £10 on your next order), but those only work for some types of product and users forget more often than not (yes, even with discounts).

Marketing on Google, Facebook, affiliate marketplaces, etc, is all automatable, and more accurate, more precise, and therefore it's easier to understand marketing ROI, and easier to justify more spend.

Because it makes them more money.

I've always kind of assumed buying more ads increases your search ranking. I wouldn't be surprised to find out if that's true at this point.

This is the case for "auction" based ad platform, I don't see how there is anyway to ever police this especially when they run the auction and have full view of all bids, essentially letting them perfectly price discriminate. Where are customers gonna go? Bing?

This and all the dark patterns to nudge the user to turn on "ad optimizations" without explaining what it does, anyone who has dabbled in google ads can surely attest

> This is the case for "auction" based ad platform,

Not stricly true for a second price auction. If you win the auction, you are know both the first and second place bid prices.

"... know both the first and second place bid prices."

Really?

Maybe for a public auction but done using Google's hidden "black box" system, how would you know that the second place bidder wasn't Google?

Google bidding in its own auctions is a separate problem from bidders' lack of access to top of book.

That's every advertising venue ever.

The modern insight is that you should be estimating your ads results instead of looking into detailed proxy metrics. And all that they lying on their metrics means is that you'll have a hard time optimizing your ads there, and thus move into other, more friendly platforms.

But, of course, I have no idea how much of this is real (it certainly is real to some extent), and how much is propaganda created to fool people into spending more on ads (it certainly is also propaganda to some extent). On some contexts, that estimation is incredibly hard to do correctly, and I don't know if people even try it.