About Google Ads:
Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos.
USP of Google Ads:
Advertisers can tailor their campaigns to specific searches and demographics.
What is the product? What is the value here?
Its an Online advertisement platform which helps companies/people to list their ads across Google search pages and affiliate websites/apps.
Two sided matching market:
• Value for advertisers: Online platform that enables businesses/people to run ads of their services and offerings. Google is popular, so it has bigger reach, and the platform has great targeting and optimizing capabilities
• Value for end users: Online search engine that shows relevant information, links and ads with respect to their keywords.
What is the innovation in Google Ads?
Single Time Auction:
Adword slots are sold in a single auction
Target Ads:
Creating a value for advertisers with a platform to access a variety of users from different demographics with a specific interest.
Control Cost:
Google Ads gives control over how much money to spend on each bid. There’s no minimum. And can choose how much to spend per month, per day, and per ad. You’ll only pay when someone clicks your ad.
Quality and Keyword pricing indexing:
Quality scoring based on the relevance of the ad to the specific keyword, the quality of landing page, frequency of click on the given ad and frequency on click through converts to a sale.
Google Affiliates:
Space to advertisers on its affiliate websites which can broaden the reach of the advertiser’s brand.
Measure your success (Analytics):
Dashboard with the impact of the campaign.
Why did a search company not license its tech instead?
Major reasons for not licensing its tech were monopoly, user profiling and revenue.
Monopoly: Search Engine was a ground breaking tech. Licensing their tech would have only put up more competition for themselves.
User Profiling: Even as a search engine, they maintain profiles of users via their email IDs. The same would become a lot more difficult if the tech was licensed to different entities.
Revenue: Licensing the tech would not have had a lot of payers and it would have been a niched crowd paying a huge sum of money. Revenue via democratizing advertising increases their customer and payer base exponentially and reduces investment to much smaller amounts.
If you were a product manager at Google when adwords was just getting started;
a) How did the product team look like?
The team must be led by a Product Manager and comprise of:
- Product Marketing Manager
- Category Managers
- Business Management Officer
- UI Designer
- UX Designer
- Data Analyst
- Business Analyst
b) What did the product portfolio look like?
- External Portfolio:
• Bidding Interface (Website/Dashboard)
• Ad Management System (Interface)
• User App - Internal Portfolio:
• An Internal Dashboard
• Customer Service Portal (Online/Call)
• Algorithm or Code for Match Making
Disclaimer: This case study is based on the time when Google Ads must have just started. Kindly, observe it the same way. However, your suggestions are very welcome. Thanks!
