tl/dr: email chains used as evidence in DOJ Google antitrust case show internal arguments about drops in # of searches, and how to increase them so that people see more ads. Search team wants to create better search results to keep people coming back.
Advertising team wants to find any way to make people search for as long and as often as possible (“increasing the journey length”) even if it means delivering less relevant search results.
You can actually read many of the trial documents here -
https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-google-llc-2020-trial-exhibits
this file was particularly interesting. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf
After reading all this stuff, I stopped advertising and have started going to independent sources for traffic. Advertising on podcasts has been fruitful.
I’m kinda done advertising on social media and search. It all feels… ick
I believe podcast advertising is way down across the industry.
Yeah, I see why, it’s the same audience. Your first ad run will be your biggest performer and it diminishes from there.
You have to cast wider and be infrequent with your ads. It’s been a learning curve.
There’s a lot of traffic out there to find but yeah, a lot of that traffic is from social and search, which gives you as an advertiser 3rd tier quality results if you advertise on websites.
Having to get creative. Need to pay sites that monitor traffic and find the ones that get a lot of direct traffic. Now getting an ad on those sites has been tough too. It’s been a grind but worth it so far.