Google: biggest trends in PPC are privacy, automation

Interpretation of “between the lines” Googlese by Fred Vallaeys:

“So Google is working on ways that they can continue to deliver relevant ads while using the least amount of user data says Raghavan.”

Google is torn between their desire to continue making mega bank and the backlash that has been slowly building against them since making mega bank became job #1. This is a very precarious position for that company, and I would hope they are looking at later-90s Microsoft as a potential model.

“Google knows humans are too busy to write great ads at scale. Yet humans don’t believe ML can do that job for them. What we’ll see are more hybrid solutions where the machine provides suggestions and makes it easy for the human to edit and deploy them at scale.”

See, this one makes me scratch my head, but it does make a lot of sense. Machine learning itself is weirdly dumb. I am reminded of Google Translate, which is an excellent product if one is simply looking for word for word translation. But as anyone even slightly schooled in Spanish-language search can tell you, Google Translate is largely incapable of rendering ad copy. A native speaker once told me: yes, those are all the words you had in English, but this is not even remotely what someone would actually say. If they can pull off this hybrid – where machine learning and data can inform at scale and make the job easier? This will be good. I don’t see that coming anytime soon though.