Google Attacks their Customers
What’s going on? I hear you say – nothing wrong with Google at the moment – but is it all as smooth as it seems. Recently, I’ve seen a spate of slow loading pages, bad connections, and software not working. It just feels abnormally high.
To make matters a little bit harder to deal with I’ve then taken to Google to try and solve these issues with no luck, there is simply no one else suffering from my ailments. I am alone. In a world of Google. Or is Google just hiding their own bad performance in their search results?
So – let’s see if we can put a tag on this.
Google Search
It’s under pressure for sure, the multitude of start-ups and alternative Browsers currently available, with even Microsoft taking to using Chromium as the underlying technology for its Edge Browser. But really you have new browsers from Brave and DuckDuckGo, not to mention Mobile Devices. It’s all about privacy obviously. But it must also be hurting the bread and butter of Google. Fewer Google Searches less income for Google from Ads.
Google Ads (Formerly Adwords) must be affected by a) even small swings in traffic and b) changes in people’s habits post-lockdown.
I would not go so far as to worry – but there could well be a significant shift to increase the number of revenue streams and reduce dependence on Google Ads.
Google Privacy
Apple/iPhones have done some blocking of Privacy, Facebook is clearly suffering from a lack of access to people’s private details. Google is no different, browsers will go Cookieless, governments will take steps to protect their citizens’ rights, and the USofA will find it more difficult to snoop on data worldwide.
As access to data becomes more difficult so people’s Google Ads expenditure becomes less effective and then customers start reducing their online budgets on worse spending their online budgets on other platforms. It’s all up up up at the moment, but the growth curve is definitely waning and the future is tougher than it has been in a long while for these tech giants.
An example of this is the collapse of Shopify’s share price. Basically, in a downturn small websites will struggle, fewer will spend the extra on Google Ads, they will then resent paying their $29 a month to Shopify and more accounts will close. These products were built for a Bull Market – which we’ve all enjoyed for a few years now – but in a Bear market, the future is far less certain and tech companies will respond in sometimes seemingly odd ways.
Google Ads
It’s not going anywhere really… However, I remember during the Financial Crash of 2008-12, at that time Google absolutely focussed on big-spending customers. If I remember rightly companies like Amazon could get all their Advertising for a set annual fee – even if it was millions of dollars, it still made per-per-click incredibly cheap for Amazon. Much cheaper for the likes of us at the raw end.
However, this is not the only thing I am noticing, apart from the increased complexities of Google Ads in general, they now even want you to upload customer data to Ads in spreadsheet format, presumably because they can no longer help themselves to this data. Google is also markedly more expensive.
I have historical data on some accounts when customers were getting 400 clicks for their monthly budget and today they are getting just 100 clicks. An obvious reason for this is an increase in competition, and this goes some way toward the answer. But really? A 400% increase in costs over 10 years sounds dubious to me.
Going Green at Google
Google has often tried to make out they are a Green company and perhaps they are, but most corporates try to take the initiative and good for them. However, what we don’t know is what Google has promised. I suspect I can look it up, but it’s not really in mainstream knowledge these days. Just what have they promised?
In fairness, I can easily imagine that all my data is stored in huge data warehousing across the world, all over the place. Google data flows everywhere from Russia to Argentina and to every state in the USA. We have almost no idea how many computers it takes to run Google, but it has to be quite a few.
And Google has a predictable problem. How many photos do they store? How many documents, emails and other stuff. How much of it is old, out of date, or even belongs to the deceased. Google has a problem what do they do with all this stuff. As purveyors of the world information, their work is cut out.
Google Photos
The first chink in the Google Armour was Google Photos. For nearly 20 years it’s been possible to upload any photo of any quality for free. The general deal was Google would use our photos for their image recognition and AI tools, and we are the guinea pigs giving our data for Google’s benefit. And boy did we upload those Photos.
Photos are unlike Music Tracks though – they are all different and individual so the storage requirements must have been huge. All change at Google – now if you want to upload photos you need to pay for the space.
This will lead to far fewer photos being uploaded and even better for Google it means they can literally delete millions of photos and they will, this should clear the decks for a while and slow down the data and energy needed to run Google.
The question is – is how they are planning to ‘Go Green’?
Google G-Suite Legacy
The next big hogger of space must be email… and while most people probably pay their $5 a month for each email address, Google did make a promise back in 2012 to grandfather in older customers for a forever free deal. To be fair this mostly benefited families with a family domain name and 3 or 4 emails.
And people built their lives on these accounts, buying Android Phones, App purchases and storing photos and while many many accounts could well be dormant through non-use. Google has taken the step to just make everyone pay.
If the account is dormant and 1 or 2 GB’s of space are being used up – fair enough it needs to be deleted and the world can be a little bit greener. However, Google is being a little greedy in trying to convert all these old accounts to paid versions or lose your data.
Google Analytics
There are two ways to get statistics about your website, the first is to monitor the server and this is great for seeing how many people looked at various pages etc. However, with Google Analytics you get two big benefits a far better and more manipulated way to view your data and secondly a filter of any useless junk that might have hit your server. Google Analytics has been a mainstay of Google’s dominance with marketers for years.
However, it’s all changed, as Google introduce GA4 – their fourth generation of Google Analytics – however, unlike any previous product launch of this nature, Google has already announced the demise of Version 3 or UA. Could the real reason for this be Data Consumption?
WordPress websites make up roughly a third of all websites in the world today, the blogging platform dominates until you consider active websites, a bit like old Facebook Accounts, it is probably that 90% of all WordPress websites are in fact dormant and if that’s the case, that’s a lot of photos being stored for no reason whatsoever.
The same is true of Google Analytics which records every hit to any part of a website day and night 365 days a year. For years. All this data has to be stored and if we take the two sides of a probable situation, Google Analytics is either storing daily information for a website that barely exists or storing tons of information for the high-flying websites – either way, to ‘Go Green’ – something has to happen to all this data.
Google’s answer is to press the reset button. There are few ‘paid’ versions of Google Analytics and actually, because of the exponential increase in resource usage, it’s extremely difficult to ‘charge’ for Analytics. Plus Analytics is a massive pusher for Google Ads due to its interconnectivity. So no bills for Google Analytics yet. Instead, a total data wipeout.
Google has announced July ’23 as the data that the old Google UA will stop recording data and effectively make all references to old Stats pointless.
Google’s Performace
You can see where I’m going with all of this… in any area that Google have built up non-essential data we’re looking at massive cutbacks to reduce energy and resource consumption. There is a goal that Google is trying to meet even if they are not really telling us about it.
Email – delete old accounts, Photos pay for personal upload, Analytics delete old data. Privacy issues are in some ways the driving factor as Google reduces their data collection. But all this comes hand in hand with Performance. Google has to provide products and services that work.
Too often these days I search for something without finding the answer, too often Google Ads is slow to load, and Google’s new GA4 Analytics is cumbersome to use, to say the least, it feels very half-finished. Google Photos has never really been a very good Photo Management or Organisation tool, and is more of a dumping ground for everything. In short, are Google’s products cracked up to be what they are meant to be?
Google will lose this battle with consumers as there are plenty of other services and products on the market that will chip away at Google’s dominance. And as a consumer of Google Products, we simply cannot accept sub-standard products. Especially if the products are increasing in complication, cost and effort to manage.
I leave you with one last thought – do you actually need Google Analytics. GA4 is not for the faint-hearted – when did you last look at the stats on your website visitors?