Google's Strategies to Raise Revenue: Ads, Pay, Analytics, AdSense - Essay Sample

Introduction

Google employs many strategies to raise its revenues. Apart from private investments and sale of stock market shares, it partners with advertisers and merchants by offering them a platform to advertise. Google trades with millions of third parties through different service platforms. The major partnerships exist through Google Ads, Google Pay, Google Analytics, and Google AdSense (Roma, & Ragaglia, 2016). Each of these products gears towards ensuring that Google meets its user needs that require the visibility of products and services. In essence, Google acts as a digital billboard, which companies rent to reach their potential customers. A google user, therefore, becomes a potential customer for another business by default.

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Google Pay is the company's service offer, designed to simplify online purchases for retailers and consumers. From their end, customers get access to free Google Pay accounts, which requires them to enter their debit or credit card numbers. The data is kept in Google's secure databases. Anytime a user makes a purchase either online or on a physical store that allows payment with Google Pay, they use their virtual account numbers to make transactions (Roma, & Ragaglia, 2016). The virtual account is an alias for the real card number that the customer holds. However, Google does not charge both the retailer or the customer. However, this service allows it to create a broad base of service users, which it then offers other paid services.

Google Ads and AdSense are the main ways that the company generates its revenues. Google Ads allow advertisers to submit their advertisements to the company. Such ads come accompanied by a list of keywords relevant to the product, service, or business that requires visibility. Anytime a Google user, the consumer, uses the search engine to make any search and keys in one or more keywords from the list attached to the ad, the ad will appear on the search engine results page (Roma, & Ragaglia, 2016). Each time a user clicks on the ad and gets directed to the product or service page; the advertiser pays Google. Google does not just cater to the big business. Any business, big or small, can rent space. Google also optimizes searches by using geographical locators to rank businesses that are closer to the customer. This approach allows the company to attract a wide range of advertisers that pay up for the Ad and AdSense options.

AdSense works similarly, except that, instead of merely having the ads appear on Google's search engine results page, a webmaster further integrates the ad onto a site with significant user traffic. Google employs its spiders to crawl and assess the content on a website. Next, it selects advertisements with keywords that relate to the webmaster's site (Roma, & Ragaglia, 2016). It is the role of the webmaster to determine the location and type of ads that they receive from Google. Whenever a user clicks on an advertisement, the site gets part of the revenue generated from the ad. Google receives the remaining portion.

The last of the revenue-generating tool for Google is Google Analytics. It is an unrivaled data analytics tool used by the company to help businesses to get a clear perspective of their customer numbers, trends, and predictions. It helps businesses track traffic on their websites. The resulting information helps to understand their users and what they are up to whenever they visit their sites (Roma, & Ragaglia, 2016). Google Analytics is the next frontier for all businesses. As the world globalizes, almost all companies are shifting online. Unlike the traditional brick-and-mortar approach, the online platform entails complex dynamics. Businesses continuously need to put into perspective the trends and quantify traffic. Hence, Google has a bright future in this regard.

Google Ads and AdSense are both strategies used by the company to provide ad placement services to advertisers. Therefore, Google acts as a middleman, helping businesses to gain visibility by exposing their ads to consumers each time a user does a search using the search engine. It can determine potential customers and target users with the most relevant information regarding what is searched using its analytics tools. Hence, at the heart of Google's business is the relationship between advertisers and users. The company tries as much as it can to improve its predictive capabilities so that users get what they are looking for, and advertisers get their ads exposed maximumly.

Future Levels of Revenue

There are at least three future levels of revenue for Google; Google Video Ads and Google Audio Ads. Audio Ads may refer to ads that feature in both online and regular radio programs. Google Video Ads feature in videos that are posted on the company's video-sharing platform YouTube (Graham, 2017). Other possible future levels of revenue include print ads, which may be ads that the company places on print media such as newspapers and magazines. There is also the potential for Google TV ads, which may take the same format as commercials that feature during TV programs.

Google Video Ads, as the name suggests, are appended on videos that are shared on the company's site or YouTube, which is one of Google's many products. The company allows users to create free YouTube accounts with which they can share or access videos from millions of other users. Video Ads pop up at the start, in the middle or at the end of a monetized video (Graham, 2017). Content creators, the persons who make videos that attract significant traffic, share the income from the ad. However, the company benefits from this revenue stream while also dealing with the risk that users will want to stop ads from popping up during their viewing of a video.

Adblocking technologies are a direct threat to Google Video and Audio Ad revenue streams as they aim to stop the ads from showing (Graham, 2017). However, Google has managed to maintain high revenues despite years of existence of the technology. There is also Index spammers, another risk factor that Google must consider seriously. Such techniques are intended to harm the search results' integrity. Users find spams to be intrusive and a nuisance. Email services, such as Google's Gmail, have to deal with the threat of spams continuously. Similarly, Google must be vigilant that users do not experience index spams in their search results.

It is noteworthy that Google's revenues result from ads. While this may be known to everyone, there are multiple other avenues that the company uses to increase its revenues. The search engine results page allows the company to subtly collect valuable data, which it trades with advertisers (Graham, 2017). Google is focusing more on in-feature revenue. The company has invested in upgrades to its traditional search engine results page features to allow better monetization of user traffic.

References

Roma, P., & Ragaglia, D. (2016). Revenue models, in-app purchase, and the app performance: Evidence from Apple's App Store and Google Play. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 17, 173-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2016.04.007

Graham, R. (2017). Google and advertising: digital capitalism in the context of Post-Fordism, the reification of language, and the rise of fake news. Palgrave Communications, 3(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0021-4