Google/Apple Secret Deal Exposed – What It Means for Your Law Firm’s Ad Costs
What We’ve Learned:
A bombshell revelation has rocked the digital ad world: Google pays Apple a colossal 36% of ad revenue generated from Safari searches, as reported by The New York Times.
The disclosure emerged in a hearing in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit filed by the DOJ that alleges Google is “monopolizing digital advertising technologies.”
This startling fact, meant to remain secret, came out during recent testimony by CEO Sundar Pichai.
Initially, Google had only reported $5B per year in payments to Apple, in exchange for being the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser, but this new revelation brings that number much, much higher.
In 2022, Google’s total revenue was $279.8 billion, most of it coming from mobile advertising. While the exact figure Google paid Apple in 2022 is not clear, it is certainly in the tens of billions of dollars.
This new information comes on the heels of a recent revelation that Google intentionally manipulated search results to increase their ad revenue – information we learned from proceedings in the same court case.
How This Affects Your Firm:
For law firms advertising on Google, this development could have significant implications. Google’s substantial payments to Apple might help explain the increased advertising costs of recent years as Google seeks to maintain its profitability.
This trickle-down effect could mean higher expenses for your firm’s online marketing campaigns, affecting your overall marketing budget and ROI. Relying solely on Google Ads could leave you with a ballooning cost-per-case that cuts into your profitability more and more as time goes on.
In 2022, SearchEngineLand found that Google Ads’ cost-per-lead had risen for 91% of industries from 2021 to 2022, with an average cost increase of 19%.
Staying competitive in this evolving scenario will require smart adaptations in your digital marketing efforts, and an aggressive search marketing partner that constantly adapts to Google’s ever-changing algorithm.
What You Can Do About It:
Your firm needs a proactive SEO partner that puts data first, and stays on top of the ever-changing landscape of Google Search. Our team optimizes law firm websites to compete for the organic positions that are often better aligned with a user’s search intent than sponsored ads. But that’s not our only strategy. We focus on the real growth you’ll get when you sign cases.
That’s what drives us.
While we can’t predict the outcome of the antitrust lawsuit yet, we’ll continue monitoring the situation closely, and keep you informed on how this affects our clients – and the legal industry as a whole – as the case progresses.
Reach out to learn more about working with us.