Black Hat PPC

For those of your with Google accounts, you would have received an email from Google last week explaining how they have changed their policy (or in our case hundreds of these dam emails!)

As much fun as it is reading Google’s Policy’s we thought we’d break it out for you to the stuff that is actually interesting, so here goes…

1. Google has announced major changes to its privacy policy that will allow it to track users’ activity across all of its various services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Search and Google+. The worst part? Users won’t be able to opt out of the new tracking system.

2. Android users will also be required to sign in with a Google account when they first activate their phones.

3. In a blog post detailing the changes, the company says it will now “treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

4. Google claims it will be transparent about how it uses customers’ data, and won’t share it with third parties unless required to by law.

5. The new policy goes into effect March 1st for anyone who uses a Google product

So basically, Google is becoming even more big brother like. It’s going to collect information about users across all platforms (and you cant get out of this unless you choose not to use Google) about your health, political opinions and financial concerns…its unbelievable! Google will know more about you than your family does.

As much as we love Google to pieces, do we really want these two to know more about us than our own families…

No thanks! 

Our advice…set up your own online profiles that are pseudonyms of yourself, to try and limit the amount of real data Google has on you and be careful what you say on Gmail and other Google products…because they are watching you!

Brought to you by the BlackHatters.

The BlackHatters were kindly send this info-graphic from Wordstream this week entitled ‘how did Google make its money in 2011?’ Which you can see below…

It makes for interesting reading from the US based PPC software developers. We cant clarify the numbers themselves in regards to how the spenders were but interesting to see which verticals are spending what in the US. You can download Wordstreams  methodology for coming up with these figures here:

Top 10 Industries Contributing to Google Revenues

Survey Methodology and Key Findings

One point to note…

The keywords and CPC’s next to each vertical are not representative to the top spending keywords in each vertical (seemed a bit misleading we thought) but these are CPC’s that come out of the Google keyword tool…but in our experience the keyword tool is between 20-33% higher in predicting CPC’s than what you actually pay.

If you want to see what we reckon the most expensive keywords are in Google in the UK, refer to our article How Google makes its money…we dont think so! Our top 10 most expensive keywords in Google.

But this got us thinking in the wake of Google last quarters profits not being as the city expected see the BBC article on it …how is Google going to make more money in 2012?

Anyone in the industry in will know there has been a big reshuffle in terms of staff and account management at Google. Whilst this has been a global reshuffle we are best positioned to talk about the UK, where Google’s head office in London has moved all account management to their office in Dublin and more accounts have come across from Dublin to the industry teams in London. The reason for this? The Google London office has been turned into one almighty sales team cunningly disguised under job titles like ‘industry manager.’

Two reasons for this change as we see it (probably not the same reasons Mountain View gave Googlers, but hey!)

1. Google profits are down and they need to make more money. The media agencies and majority of clients are based in London…so Google has its ‘top boys’ in place to upsell as much as they can (GDN, mobile, You Tube the usual suspects!) and if clients don’t play ball with Google…they ship their accounts off to Dublin for remote account management (not ideal if you are spending over £100k a month on Google…if you spent that kind of money with any other company they’d roll out the red carpet for you.)

2. A lot of Googlers are not exactly doing cartwheels about these new changes. Senior managers who were responsible for teams of 20 are now managing teams of 5. And some Googlers who were working on prestigious brands and getting nice bonuses (its all about the bonus!) are now working smaller spending accounts which will mean a reduction in bonuses.

So not a bunch of happy campers at Google at the moment which is understandable. There is nothing they can do about these changes (welcome to our World) and they are effectively being managed out by Google HQ in order to cut the wage bill of Googles 50k+ employees. Not great if you’d been at Google for 5+ years and bought into the Google dream of one big happy family who weren’t corporate and did things their own way.

We wish the Googlers all the best as they do work bloody hard in their jobs as its long hours at Google. But where do they go now after working at Google? It’ll be a step down for them moving into client service roles at agencies (bursting the Google ego some of them have) and a move to another search engine (Yahoo or Bing) isn’t exactly appealing either. Facebook, Twitter or Linked In are an option but they have relatively small operations in the UK at the moment compared to Google.

We’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there, but the point of the matter is that Google is looking at cost saving measures in order to boost its profits in the next quarter.

So the message of all this is simply…

Google profits down = Google staff even more salesy + Google cut costs in managing people out of their roles = how Google will make money in 2012.

Now all we have to do is work out how we make an info-graphic to show that!

Brought to you by Black Hat PPC.