How to Bill for Work when it’s not in your Client’s Interest?
I want answers and I want them now! How to Bill for work that is not wanted by clients for something they don’t subscribe to, nor want are happy without and is not in their interests?
Yes – I am talking GDPR or whatever it is called in the UK (none of us know). I like to keep my blog a little lively and on topic especially when the topic is so horrendously uninteresting.
I suppose the answer is in the term ‘the clients’ interest’ – being legal is in the clients’ interest, just they don’t want to bother with it when it comes to GDPR. I cannot say I am surprised as I doubt ever a more useless piece of legislation has ever occurred in the history of the Internet. I’ll come back to this shortly.
News Hot in from Google
It’s not really hot in – it just might be for readers of this Blog. Apple’s Safari went Cookieless a few years ago… plenty of other Browsers have as well forcing Google’s Chrome to make the promise that they too would go Cookieless at some point, in fact, 1st August 2024, and then delayed 6 months and not reneged upon indefinitely.
So what’s going on, well Apple’s Safari never went Cookieless did it. All that happens is that when you install a fresh virgin version of Safari the Cookie settings are set to off – same with most other Browsers. Google Chrome was slightly slower off the mark, the default setting is that most Cookies were on by default and can be dialled down to off if a user requires.
Again you might well ask what is going on, well Cookies are often essential to the functioning of a website, a lot of the Internet will break without Cookies, typical examples are Banking security, Shopping Baskets, email services, and all those types of stuff. Where things get down and dirty and need to work. When this happens Browsers occasionally prompt you to change your Cookie Settings to ‘on’. And generally, that means changing for any website you might visit.
Thus most people have to switch Cookies on – even if it’s just for one or two of their more important uses of the Internet. Spotify or Netflix I thinks.
The Hot News by the way is that Google reneged on their promise to go Cookieless. Their excuse is that Advertisers, surprise surprise, aren’t happy. They want to know what people are doing on their websites.
The New Law
There’s nothing new – it’s just that an entire ecosystem of tech companies has grown up around the issue of Cookies. In the past, no one cared, now thousands of jobs depend on this law. You can’t make this stuff up.
In the beginning, no one knew how to prevent Cookies from ‘doing their job’, one basically saw those pathetic banners saying things like ‘This website uses Cookies – OK?’ – clicking Ok however obtrusive it was did nothing, life went on.
The next problem to overcome was the fact that any web designer could create a Cookie that could do anything you wanted. If I wanted to record the fact that you visited over three pages and spent 90 seconds reading this article I could. There are no standards and there still are no standards. You cannot visit some sort of Cookie Look-Up service – it doesn’t exist. Sure some websites left there mark, in particular Google Analytics, but unless the Cookie was common to about 90% of all websites – basically blocking or adhering to the law was a mugs game.
The law states that every cookie must explain its purpose, what it does and why it’s doing whatever it does. So good luck with that.
What has changed more recently is that this ecosystem of tech companies is doing their jobs far better, they banned together, had their conferences, decided there was a lot of money to be made and formed the CookieDatabase.org. This is a sort of general database of all Cookies. It meant that tech could be used which scans a website for Cookies and if found their purpose, intent and details could be quickly looked up and used.
Back to Google
Good news for Google, with all this extra tech in place, perhaps they had a really good excuse not to get rid of Cookies, too many jobs depended on them. The excuses Google comes up with for why they and their advertisers should be allowed to monitor everything we do keep coming up. And there are few lengths Google or Meta or any other big tech companies would not go to keep this exploitation going.
Google fight back. In order to ‘preserve’ a user’s privacy and to encourage legal practices Google and in particular Google Ads have said they will force advertisers to install ‘proper’ Cookie control on websites. In other words, one of the more annoying types of Cookie banners that actually stop a website from working altogether. Once a website has subscribed to one of Google’s ‘certified’ partners supplying Cookie banners do actually stop Cookies if a user requires them to, i.e. legal ones. If advertisers don’t install one of these, then their Ads will cost more.
There’s a host of caveats to this issue.
- These rules seem to apply to B2B businesses as much as B2C, yet there is no legal requirement for a B2B business to have a Cookie Blocker on their website. GDPR applies differently for B2B.
- Google still Tracks all users that select No to Cookies – they have to otherwise how can they tell if someone says no.
- Cookie Banner supplying companies also give you stats on who does or doesn’t agree to what Cookies. They have to because the law required companies to provide a ‘Proof of Acceptance’ and the ability to ‘Delete’ user info if requested. Which becomes impossible unless the user is tracked.
However, the biggest issue of all is that Google has declared it will infill data that is missing using Google AI (Gemini). Yes you heard that right… Google measures how many people do or don’t accept Cookies and then using that data will ‘guess’ how many clicks you might have got or paid for and charge you for it.
When Google Ads say you had 127 clicks and £0.98 per click – it’s total nonsense, it’s made up, it has to be by definition, or in this case Google’s own Gemini AI.
Backlash
There is a backlash, and it’s the Advertisers who are leading it, they are not willing to spend their $ on something without proof, in other words, if they get 127 clicks they want 127 clicks.
The first result of this is that Google has been forced to renege on its promise of a Cookieless internet and secondly, we’re going to see an increasing use of Cookies that are controlled by advertisers and not Google. Advertisers will want to make sure they are spending their $ effectively and if Google cannot be trusted they will take matters into their own hands. And they can.
Where does this leave us – the problem is this is all well and good for the giants in the industry, big websites, big tech, large multi-nationals they all have plenty of room to manoeuvre, it’s the small business, the people that wouldn’t know how to deal with users data even if they didn’t know they had it that are going to suffer.
Suffer because they will be paying extra in Google Ad Clicks, and if they don’t pay extra to Google they will be paying extra to the Cookie Banner companies, or the additional service providers for security, legality or whatever. In short, they should be paying me!
But it is a cost they want, it serves no benefit other than inching their way to a more legal website. And finally, there is no choice.
Our problem – How to Bill for this work
Trouble we have is that we run Google Ads accounts for clients, we monitor the keywords, costs, ads, budgets etc. Often the key to a successful campaign is in the results. It’s our USP, we get you results. But if Google is going to penalise Ad accounts that don’t play by the rules, then Results are going to go down and costs are going to up.
So, we’re footing this bill at the moment – if a client chooses to use NCompass for their Google Ads management, we’ll sort out the GDPR for you – it’s in our interest to get good results.
Now see if you can find any other Google Ads Agency or Pay-Per-Click company willing to make that offer to you.
I look forward to hearing from you.