This week, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate, which aims to break up Google's ad division. As reported in The Verge, the bill would induce Google's parent company "to divest majorities of its digital advertising business. Google’s advertising marketplace rakes in billions each quarter for the company, pulling in $54 billion across Search, YouTube, and its ad networks in the first quarter of this year alone."
Google ads have become a mainstay for businesses looking for a centralized way to reach customers online. Open up any forum relating to advertising for small businesses, and you'll find people discussing how to effectively market with the platform. In many ways, Google Ads is the dominating force when it comes to online marketing. As such, critics have made the case that Google operates as a monopoly, so powerful that it ends up driving out healthy competition.
In any case, changes in the way Google Ads operates are likely to affect you if you rely on it to advertise.
How Does Google Ads Work?
Most of the advertising that occurs with Google Ads is pay-per-click (PPC). With PPC advertising, you contract with an ad agency, in this case Google, who moves your company's website higher up on search engine result pages. Your fee is determined by the number people who click on your website.
Google Ads is one of the most effective ways to advertise online. According to Google's Economic Impact Report from 2021, their advertising tools generated roughly $617 billion in economic activity across the country.
Paid advertising of this kind is distinct from search engine optimization (SEO). Considered a more organic form of advertising, SEO occurs when a company curates their web content to appeal to a search engine's algorithm. This can be done through the use of keywords in online copy as well as the production of regular marketing content. As SEO improves, the company's site will rise close to the top search engine results pages. Unlike PPC advertising, this form of marketing doesn't require direct monetary investment. The trade-off is that SEO takes a long time to develop, and, even then, someone who forks over cash for a PPC ad may still end up higher on the results page.
What Happens if Google Ads Gets Broken Up?
There are alternatives to relying on Google Ads for marketing. Other platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn also sport their own ad mechanisms (although it's worth noting that they could be affected by the proposed Senate legislation, too). So, it's not as if small businesses will be without options.
Still, changes in Google's Ad business will inevitably mean that firms that rely on Google for marketing may need to rethink their strategy. Luckily, tech experts have been adapting to change of this kind since the inception of search engines and websites. The experts at Titan Tech can help guide you through any sea-changes in the tech world. They can inform you on algorithm changes and help create a viable strategy for surviving in a new paradigm. Give them a call today for more information.
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