Google had a massive multi-quarter campaign to get people to install their Google App recently across all possible mediums...now it's clear it was tied to this ad-push.
Maybe, but in this case they had advertising in the app which Google is claiming may have been fraudulent, and it seems everything ballooned out from there. There’s no indication that this has anything to do with advertising on their website.
Google is literally one of the world's biggest ad companies.
They're constantly toeing the line of messing with ad blockers and letting people use them. It seems that someone has seen ad engagement go down enough to start doing stuff like this.
When Google replaced mobile app install campaigns with machine learning based "universal app campaigns" (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167162?hl=en) that give you very little control over the placement of the ads I always wondered if they were simply showing ads to Play Store users who were searching for the name of our app and charging us for installs we would have gotten for free anyway. Does anyone have here have experience with UAC or know how to prevent this type of thing from happening?
> the signal is that they don't want their search results to annoy users by showing them app install ads on the first hit
which is absolutely great. Well done Google.
Everything else in your post is weird and contradictory. They're apparently fine with advertising and non-annoying app install banners but they're going to make annoying app install banners less visible in search results. I'm really not seeing the problem.
> It might be good for the consumer but that's just a side effect.
See what I mean? So it's a great move and should be celebrated, but lets not congratulate Google on their motives? OK, I think we can all live with that.
Google has certainly done that before (especially with Windows Phone) but we should probably give them the benefit of the doubt here. Is it really in Google's best interest to no longer effectively serve ads to their users?
As others have suggested, this was probably an inadvertent change.
Is this google ad campaign linked to the play store directly? How does the ad campaign figure out whether a 'download' or conversion happened? If its a click/google search campaign, won't it stop at redirecting a user to the app download page?
Google is an advertisement company there is nothing conspiratorial about them using their market share to force ads on people. After all whats the point of supporting chrome if it sells no adds.
Presumably Google could already be doing this in their own ads before this announcement. I don't know if this announcement implies any nefarious motives in this space (not to say they aren't planning this, but just seems unrelated).
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