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Google’s 2019 ‘Code Yellow’ Blurred Line Between Search, Ads

Google’s 2019 ‘Code Yellow’ Blurred Line Between Search, Ads

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Emails presented in the Justice Department’s historic antitrust hearing in opposition to the search engine giant revealed that in February 2019, the previous head of search at Alphabet Inc.’s child firm Google complained to coworkers that his team was getting excessively involved with advertising for the beneficial aspects of the product and company.

Google’s 2019 ‘Code Yellow’ Blurred Line Between Search, Ads

Image Source: techxplore.com

To allow its engineers to develop on Google’s search engine without being constrained by the team whose aim is to maximise advertising income, Google keeps a firewall across its search and ad teams. However, in February 2019, when evidence from the antitrust trial was made public on Tuesday, Google secretly issued a “Code Yellow” due to worries that the business could miss its quarterly targets for search revenue.

Documents state that during the seven-week crisis, engineers from Google’s search as well as Chrome browser divisions were transferred to investigate the reason behind the slowdown in user inquiries.

Justice Division Ben Gomes, a previously employed Google employee, was contacted by the firm to defend itself and demonstrate the progress it has achieved in search, especially in the mobile space. On interrogation, however, attorney David Dahlquist of the Justice Department brought to light the conflicts that existed between Gomes’ search department and its marketing competitors.

The goal of the interrogation was to disprove Google’s claims that its search team only concentrates on enhancing user experience and is occasionally drawn into the advertising space, where the Department of Justice claims Google has been able to hike prices without facing opposition.

In its eighth week of trial, the fundamental question is whether Google used billions of dollars to suppress competition and retain its monopoly over internet search, in violation of the law.

Also Read: Keep Your Windows Drivers Up-to-Date: How to Check, Install, Update, and Uninstall Drivers on Windows

Google Chief Executive Officer Pichai refutes the Department of Justice's Claims of Evidence Erasure.

Google refuted the notion that the firm’s advertising revenue targets had an impact on results from searches and innovation in a statement.

“The organic results you see in search are not affected by our ads systems or by the ads we show for a query,” said Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesperson.

finance.yahoo.com

Google claims that its improved offering has allowed them to grab almost 90 percent of the search engine market, and that the general public has benefited from its innovations in internet search. However, emails shown in court on Tuesday indicated that several important members of the search team at the business expressed worry about Google prioritising revenue above innovation.

Google Tweaks Ad Auctions to Hit Revenue Targets, Executive Says

Google Tweaks Ad Auctions to Hit Revenue Targets, Executive Says

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Alphabet Inc.’s tech giant, Google, has come under scrutiny as it was revealed in a federal antitrust trial that the company has been making adjustments to its advertising auctions to ensure it meets revenue targets. Jerry Dischler, the Vice President for Google’s advertising products, disclosed on Monday that these tweaks sometimes result in ad price increases of up to 5%, impacting advertisers and businesses relying on Google’s advertising platform.

Google Tweaks Ad Auctions to Hit Revenue Targets, Executive Says
Image Source: business-standard.com

While Google frequently fine-tunes the algorithms governing its ad auctions, it has been customary for the company not to inform advertisers about pricing changes. Dischler’s testimony shed light on internal communications, including a May 2019 email, in which he discussed the need to make changes to meet quarterly revenue targets set by Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat. The fear of disappointing Wall Street was a strong motivator, as Dischler expressed concern about potential stock price losses and their impact on morale and the sales team.

The Justice Department has accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online search through agreements with web browsers and smartphone manufacturers. These arrangements ensure Google’s search engine is the default option for users, effectively limiting competition in the search market. A significant portion of Google’s revenue, over 60%, comes from search ads, amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020.

During cross-examination, Dischler emphasized Google’s commitment to delivering “honest results” and a clear separation between paid and organic search results. He maintained that financial incentives did not compromise the quality of search results.

However, Dischler did admit that some auction changes had led to price increases of up to 5% for typical advertisers, and in some cases, as much as 10%. Nevertheless, he expressed concerns that a 15% price hike might drive advertisers to competitors like Meta Platforms Inc. or TikTok.

Google currently boasts around 5 million advertisers, significantly fewer than Meta’s 10 million. Retail advertisements constitute the largest category, comprising approximately 35% of Google’s search ad revenue. Dischler acknowledged that Google faced increasing competition from newcomers like TikTok and Amazon.

Also Read: Microsoft’s Nadella and Oracle’s Ellison Discuss the Future of Cloud and AI

Interestingly, Amazon’s growing success in retail advertising is attributed to its ability to provide advertisers with superior data on ad effectiveness compared to Google. This has prompted some consumer goods makers to contemplate shifting their advertising budgets away from Google and toward Amazon.

One notable change that boosted Google’s revenue involved RGSP (Runner-Up Gets Top Slot), where the second-place bidder was given the top ad slot. This innovative strategy flipped the convention, often placing major advertisers like Amazon in the second position, thereby increasing Google’s revenue.

As the trial continues, the focus remains on Google’s practices in shaping the digital advertising landscape and its potential impact on competition and market dynamics.

Google Ad Sense Policy violations- How to avoid from being banned?

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If you are a AdSense publisher, you must be aware of AdSense program guidelines. AdSense program guideline comprises of content policy and rules to detect  fake, fraudulent clicks on Ads.

Any violation of any of these guidelines can result in either a ban on your AdSense account or stopping Ad serving on the website violating the policy guidelines. AdSense publishers are supposed to run ads on a website which has family safe content (no porn or obscene content, images or videos) with no copyright infringement.

Google ads aren’t permitted on sites that contain harassing or bullying content, or on content that incites hatred or promotes violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity. Additionally, Google ads may not appear on content that incites or advocates for harm against an individual or group.



Off late Google has gone quite aggressive in implementation of AdSense policy guidelines. Google has been disabling Ad serving for any website which has nude or porn content. If you’re using AdSense and have such content which violates AdSense policy, don’t wait for warning notification from Google.  Either remove ads from such content or remove such content from your website. Now a days Google instead of disabling AdSense account, disables ads on domain itself. In such scenario you won’t be able to runs ads even if you have another AdSense account.


Steps to follow if your AdSense account or website is banned

In case Google has already disabled ad serving on your website or blog, do following in order to get Ads enabled-

  • Take steps to remove violation- either remove such content or remove Google Ads
  • Disallow such URLs and keywords for AdSense bot in Robots.txt.
    Example- User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
    Disallow: /*xxx
  • Make internal process comprising automated as well human resources to check content quality including that of images and videos
  • File an appeal with Google using this form

Google AdSense policy review team would review your website for violations and if they find everything fine, Ad serving would start.  Normally this process takes around 5 to 6 days before you get to hear from policy team. See it as an opportunity to improve content quality on your website or blog which will not only earn you more from Ads, but also good ranking in search engines.

 

If you are using Google DFP, you might find it difficult to get AdSense Ads enabled since most of the time policy team fail to find AdSense code in HTML sources of your pages. If your account is eligible you can send an email to AdSense support as well using this page.

 

If your account is disabled due to some unethical activity or clicks, file an appeal here.  For more details on AdSense policy guidelines visit AdSense support page.

How to verify your Google DFP Ads from other countries?

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One of the challenges that Google DFP (Ad manager) account managers especially those who are new often face is to set up different Ad banners for different regions or countries and to test them out. The challenge is not to set up different Ad banners since that can be easily done by creating different line items and selecting target criteria and setting Geography. Challenge is to verify whether correct banners appear in targeted region or country?

One can easily verify the Ad banners for the country or region he or she is browsing in but to verify Ad banners in other countries either you need a remote server in all those regions or countries or use some good proxy. You may also seek help of your friends if you are lucky enough to have friends in all those countries.

If you don’t have access to all the things mentioned above, try this simple technique and you would be able to see Ad banners from most parts of the world. Visit some performance testing website which has option to select country and which also provides screen shots in result set.

Two such websites are http://www.webpagetest.org/ and http://loads.in/. By using these websites you would be able to verify which Ad banners appear in different countries. Using this technique you can test any public web page and make sure that Ad is rendering fine without any hiccups.

How to maximize revenue with Google DFP for small business?

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This post is not on “What is Google DFP?” or “How to setup Google DFP account? We’re assuming that you already know how to set up Google DFP account and generate tags for ad slots. In case you are among those who aren’t aware of Google DFP (Formally known as Google Ad-manager), this link or video below should help you understand.






Google DFP  offers lot of flexibility and ease to manage and optimize the ad slots. Using Google DFP you can decide which ad banner will appear in which region of the world or which banner will appear if specific keyword is found on a page. Selling ad slots to third party advertisers or running your own ad banners is quite easy with DFP.


How to Geo- target ads with Google DFP?

With Google DFP you can decide upon in which country AdSense ads should appear and in which country or region your Ad banners or Ad banners from your advertisers should appear. Here are the basic steps:

  • Create new placement if you want to use a new slot
  • Create a new ad unit, assign the placement and disable Adsense for it
  • Create a new order+Line item or add line item to existing order
  • Under option ‘add targeting’, select a new placement from inventory or you can select old one if you want to use some existing placement
  • Now click geography
  • You can either rule out few countries by selecting “click does not match” or set it to be ” matches these conutries”  and select the countries
  • Fill rest of the fields
  • Add banners to this line item
  • Put the code on web page

Your banners will be served on the basis of the country criteria set by you.


How to serve ads targeted to specific keywords?

To serve ad banners depending upon keywords on the page, you first need to have keywords defined in the HTML of the pages so that DFP code can read it on the page load and serve ads based on keyword criteria set in DFP. Let us say you want to run some banner on all pages having keywords “Web 2.0”, “Technology”, HTML of page should have keywords defined as follows:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
           GA_googleAddAttr("keywords","Web 2.0?");
            GA_googleAddAttr('keywords','Technology');
    </script>

You can ad as many as attributes on the fly as the number of keywords you would like to have. You can get the code done to pick the keywords from the page and add above mentioned attributes when page loads.

Now set keyword criteria in DFP for line item which will compete for these slots.

  • Go to settings of line item, add banners
  • Click custom criteria
  • Add keywords in “keyword is” field (in this case web 2.0 and technology)

Save the line item and you are done.


How to serve your own ad banners where Google AdSense fail to serve any ad?

If you are an AdSense publisher, you would know that there are times when AdSense doesn’t serve any ads or serve only public service ads. Your ad slots in such cases go waste. This situation can be worse when you run a website which has user generated content. Since users can upload any kind of content having keywords where Google never serve ads or such content for which Google doesn’t have any relevant ad, your page impressions will go waste.

In such situations Google DFP comes in handy. You can set up either your own banners or sell this inventory to some advertiser and make use of the impressions which otherwise would have gone waste. Here is how to do this:

  • Create a line item with type ” house” and  set it to compete with AdSense slots by selecting relevant placements
  • Set end time to unlimited
  • Set Goal=100% for remaining impressions

Add your own or advertiser’s ad banners to this line item.

Now whenever AdSense doesn’t have any ad, this line item will compete for remaining impressions and your Ad banners will appear on such pages where AdSense fails to serve any ad.