Is Google’s engagement-hacking masking stalled growth?

Mike Blumenthal and I have highlighted Google’s efforts to keep local searchers on Google, or within the Google ecosystem, in numerous fora for the last decade. In the early days, this mindset seemed primarily based around Google maintaining its share of eyeballs amidst the mobile insurgency of Facebook, and apps more broadly.

As it relates to local search, in these earlier days–an era of mobile-unfriendly or nonexistent business websites–constraining a searcher’s engagement within Google Business Profiles provided a more “efficient journey” (term used below) for local searchers.¹

But increasingly, as many of the DOJ discovery documents in the recently-decided antitrust case have highlighted (including the now-famous “code yellow” email from Ads boss Jerry Dischler), keeping users on Google isn’t solely about retaining market share, and it’s no longer about providing a more efficient journey: it’s about increasing the odds they will perform additional searches. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the eyes of Google executives, additional searches mean additional bites at the ad revenue apple. Even if ad click rates per search go down as a result of more impressions, ad click rates per session could actually be rising as query refinements drive more precisely-targeted ads. And any raw increase in ad clicks of course sends more money to Google’s coffers.