Are Google Ads' Targets Challenged People?

Google Ads is Google's bidding advertising platform. Or as some people call it - the Ripoff of the Century.

Basically, you'd expect the platform to enable advertisers to publish relevant ads and place biddings. The highest biddings would obviously show on top of the search results and users would decide whether or not the ads are persuasive and credible enough to click on.

Simple, right?

Not at all! Why? Because Google decided to take control over the "relevance" component and use it in the most nasty ways possible to boost its profits.

When advertisers create TV commercials or advertise in magazines, they set the goals, budget and phrase the messages for their campaigns. The TV networks never interfere with the advertisers' messages and they are not trying to influence or change the campaigns.

That's not the case with Google Ads. When we advertise on Google Ads, we may set the goals and budget, but we can't create our messages freely. When it comes to phrasing our messages, Google is interfering with a whole set of pseudo-AI rules, forcing us to produce ads and landing pages that we didn't necessarily intend to. Furthermore, Google's secret and mysterious system decides whether our ads are good or bad, punishing us through a highly expensive metric - the Quality Score.

The Horror of The Mighty Quality Score

Google calls it a metric to determine how relevant and useful the ad is to users, based on relevance and the landing page. Other people prefer to call it a metric to calculate the Ripoff of the Century.

If you think of it, this is a basic algorithm that determines if our campaign's creative is right or wrong. It doesn't matter if you are a professional writer, a talented marketing expert or if you hired a leading Ad agency. Google's algorithm is the ultimate assessment tool that determines if our ads are relevant and if our landing pages are well structured.

I hear you say "Maybe it's based on Artificial Intelligence! Maybe it's an intelligent system that knows better than us how to sell our products or services".

No, it's not!

Google's guidelines for writing ads are very basic. They want you to include keywords in headlines, match keywords with landing pages, include calls to action and a few more basic things like that.

That's definitely not AI!

Don't get me wrong! On their organic search platform, these demands make perfect sense. Google wants to create a relevant, high quality search engine, which is fine. But as an advertising platform, it should have nothing to do with Google's perception of perfection or ad relevance! TV networks never ask advertisers to change their commercials to increase relevance, and magazines never ask advertisers to change their ads because they didn't include enough keywords!...

Leave the Creative to the Advertisers!

Advertisers who pay money for using Google Ads should be the only ones to decide how they phrase and deliver their messages! It's up to the targets to decide whether the ads are persuasive and reliable or not.

Quality Score As the Robbery Gun

I hear you say... "Maybe Google is just striving for advertising perfection?..."

No, Google is not striving for perfection, Google is striving to maximize profits!

The quality score is merely an ingenious tool for maximizing profits. Google's pseudo-AI system will always find a reason to lower the ad's quality, which means that the advertiser will have to increase biddings. And yes, you guessed right - higher biddings means higher profits for Google.

Take for example the rule that text ads MUST include keywords. Suppose that I'm selling umbrellas and that I'm using the following ads:

Ad #1: The only umbrella to keep you dry.

Ad #2: Never get wet in rain again.

Both ads are relevant and you don't have to be a highly competent scientist to understand the offers behind the ads. And yet the second ad will immediately boost your biddings, vaporising your advertising budget in no time.

Is there a good reason to treat the targets of the ads as challenged people who are able to react only to simple infantile messages? I don't think so...

I'm not going to exhaust you with the many tricks Google uses to grab advertising money because that's not the topic. After all, Google Ads is a business that needs to make money for their shareholders, just like any other big player on the market.

My problem is with the hypocritical and deceiving concept behind the platform, which uses the fake request for advertising relevance as a pretext to boost profits.

Unless you’re a Google shareholder, correct me if I’m wrong.

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