Google is changing how its sales teams work as the internet giant tries to promote an important AI-powered advertising product, according to multiple sources.
Some of the ad giant’s sales staffers who work with large companies are shifting to sales teams that are dedicated to selling to smaller, less sophisticated advertiser clients, according to multiple sources.
These smaller advertisers work with the Google Customer Solutions (GCS) team and spend between $250,000 to $2 million per quarter, according to a Google source. Meanwhile large companies typically spend at least $4 million to $5 million with Google quarterly, and work with an internal team at Google known as Large Customer Sales (LCS).
Google is shifting resources to middle-tier advertisers because larger advertisers don’t need access to the amount of resources from Google that they once did, current and former staffers said. Many of those larger advertisers support their own internal team of Google experts or work with agency specialists who can provide hands-on service.
Google is also on a bigger drive to automate the services it offers customers through technology like artificial intelligence.
Since Google cut its workforce by 12,000 employees in January, a stream of LCS staffers – who are typically more senior, experienced, and expensive – have been laid off, according to multiple sources. An official restructure of the sales team hasn’t been announced internally but the recent sales moves reflect this broader trend, those sources said.
Multiple ad agency experts noted these shifts are coming as Google’s advertising revenue growth has slowed, with one search consultant saying that Google is trying to “give more help to faster-moving segments.”
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is set to report its earnings later on Tuesday.
One Google employee said that while the tech giant is no longer experiencing the “rocketship growth” it had two years ago, “there’s still growth in the right pockets.”
One of those growth pockets seems to be Performance Max, a tool where advertisers let Google’s AI decide where their money should be spent across Google’s properties, including search, YouTube, and the Google display ad network. Performance Max has been a big initiative for Google since it launched in 2020.
The Google source said Performance Max was a good way to eke “incremental revenue from advertisers,” and there’s been a big incentive internally to push it. And Google has been particularly aggressive selling this solution to smaller and mid-sized advertisers, multiple sources say. Google has said that advertisers on average achieve better results when they use the Performance Max product.
“Performance Max has been around for three years, keeps getting better and drives increased performance for advertisers,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’re continuing to invest in support and sales teams to service both large and mid-sized customers who are benefiting from this product and the increased conversions it provides. Of course we are always looking for ways to improve our support models, to help make all our customers, large and small, successful.”
Sellers are rewarded for hitting goals and selling Google products using a points system in some teams. “The weighting on [Performance Max] is definitely higher because it is a priority product,” the current Google employee said. A former Google employee who recently left the company said, “Every single person has some sort of PMax target.”
Agency executives have also noticed Google sales people trying to push Performance Max to mid-sized advertisers. “Oh hell yeah. That I can confirm,” one source said. “We’ve had a great relationship with our sales team historically — they never really pushed the other products. But Performance Max has been a push lately.”
However, some people familiar with the product are skeptical of Google’s sales strategy.
“The argument goes, automation will solve problems so you can focus on strategy but that’s somewhat of an empty promise when you don’t provide the rationale to agencies to promote strategy, or give an inside element to understand how they can work Performance Max into their own systems,” the former Google employee said.
Multiple ad agency staffers said they are wary about using Performance Max because the tool doesn’t yet offer them the controls they require to dictate where their ads can and can’t run.
“Performance Max, in my opinion, is a crock,” the previous agency source said. This person did not trust that the tool was actually driving the results it claimed to drive, because the reports it generated did not show in-depth detail around the performance of things like clicks and search. “It’s another example of going for growth,” this source said. “If Google can just go after budget without question, and nobody’s going to look at these reports, then they can just demand $500,000 because we perform. But all they’re doing is running a corollary attribution for things that aren’t directly related and claiming credit for it.”
Google has also been going after social ad budgets with an AI-powered product called Demand Gen. Launched three months ago, Demand Gen selects an advertisers’ best-performing video ads and image ads and serves them across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Google Discover, and Gmail.
Even though the broader ad spend winter of 2022 and 2023 seems to be thawing, advertisers are still scrutinizing their spend. Google’s latest moves are an effort to ensure it is doing its best to make sure advertisers go towards it rather than to the other digital ad giants, the current employee said.
“What can we do to compete against Meta, TikTok, etc,” this person said.
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