Google’s recent decision to lay off thousands of staff has caused a stir in the business world. Despite complaints about low support levels, Google is moving forward with plans to downsize its advertising sales team. Google is also planning to terminate thousands of search quality raters who have been a part of its process for improving search quality for over a decade.
Layoff in Advertising and Sales Team in Google Ads
Google Ads customer service has been significantly declining. Search marketers have described it as an all-time low. Just weeks after Google confirmed that customer support would not be phased out, but changes would be made, the news of the staff layoff was released.
There are hundreds of advertising and sales staff who are impacted by this layoff. This has left many in the industry concerned about the future of Google’s customer support and the impact it will have on advertisers and businesses relying on Google Ads.
Layoff of Search Quality Raters
Google had a contract with Appen, an Australian data service company. Appen was providing third-party search quality raters to Google. Search quality raters assess the quality of Google’s search results. They do not directly influence the search results, and they cannot downgrade or upgrade a specific site in Google search engine result page, but their feedback helps to understand which changes make search more useful.
Google notified Appen that their contract would be ending on March 19th, 2024, without any prior notice. Due to this sudden cancellation Appen is expected to be in a loss of $82.8 million in revenue, with a gross margin of 26%.
What is Google Saying About the Layoffs?
According to Google, they go through a rigorous process every year to structure their advertising and sales team in Google Ads to provide the best service to their Ads customers. As a part of this process, they have decided to eliminate a few hundred roles globally.
Google has also stated that employees who are impacted can apply for open roles elsewhere at Google. Additionally, Google is expecting LLMs (Large language models) or Google AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make a big difference in the customer support area which will help improve the customer experience. This change has not yet taken place, but it is expected to happen soon.
Regarding the layoffs of search quality raters, Google decided to end their contract with Appen as a part of its process to evaluate and adjust many of its supplier partnerships across Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to ensure its vendor operations are as efficient as possible. Google has been working on these vendors restructuring process for over a year and it has concluded that cancelling this contract with Appen will not impact its product or services since it works with many other suppliers to provide quality rating and external feedback on the experience of its products.
Why We Care
Advertisers and digital marketers are already facing challenges in resolving issues with their Google Ads accounts since they are not able to reach Google customer representatives. The reduction in staff could make this situation worse and even more challenging for marketers to address the errors and appeals effectively.
Google has stated that it currently has about 16,000 search quality raters and Appen represents a significant portion of the total quality raters contracted. As of now, it is not clear if Google intends to replace all these quality raters with AI. If such a change were to occur, how substantial would the shift be from using humans for over a decade to using AI for this process? This also raises concerns about whether this change will lead to a decline in Google’s search quality in the future.
At Ontario SEO, we stay on top of these changes, so you don’t have to. If you are looking for someone to do the heavy lifting when it comes to your Google Ads, reach out.
