Now if everyone is increasing budgets, prices of goods, ad spend, that story would make more sense. But that would correlate to whole market movements which honestly makes sense for something of this scale
> Don’t most companies have budgets?
Yes
> Wouldn’t raising prices just cause companies to buy less?
Not necessarily, the "ad-spend" typically remains a fixed budget until a given ad-campaign is complete.
The kicker is basically the cost per ad is increased, which means the budget for an ad-campaign is consumed more quickly. Thus, for example, rather than an ad-campaign lasting 4 weeks and generating X number of impressions, it lasts 80% of that time with 80% the impressions. Thus, even though the revenue is fixed per ad-campaign, Google would be able to cycle through more ad-campaigns
> I feel like folks don’t just increase spend when prices go up, when it comes to ads.
Depends on the company. In all probability the ad-spend would remain fixed and the companies just get less return on that spend (as an aside, the ROI for ads is highly debated to begin with)
This is, in fact, companies buying less (advertising), which is what I took the parent comment to be asking. It certainly isn't spending less.
Google increases ads 5% or 10%
Agency Y reports 5% or 10% decrease from last quarter. Company X goes well that's not great. Agency Y makes changes, Google changes back 5-10% change, next quarter it goes up. Company X goes great!
Google just made 5-10% extra an entire quarter.
Rinse and repeat.
Basically 5-10% is nothing, nobody would really notice. General traffic would probably change 5-10% every quarter, same with spending habits and other factors.
At one point though, it isn't profitable to market there anymore and I move onto something else, which wouldn't be what they want I would assume? That's where the ad "market" comes into play. The market decides the price supposedly? Is the argument that there is nothing else to move on to when they fudge the price?
They being sold less product for a high price and their tools to identify that are manipulated opaquely.
Setting aside all the challenges south multiple devices lagged purchasing etc there are a lot of sales processes that take a digital lead and convert it to real human contact so attribution is very difficult
Google obviously tracks lots of people through multiple devises, because they are in eccosystem.