Google’s Q1 earnings looking better than projected

Google said that ad and search revenue dropped to $24.502bn during the first quarter of 2020, however their overall revenue beat projected exceptions even during this period of difficulty for business.

Google pointed out there had been ‘significant slowdown’ from ad revenue for March after coming out of the gates strong at the beginning of the year.

As expected, the coronavirus outbreak was the main factor for search and ad revenue to take a downturn from the $27.185bn figure recorded Q4 2019.

Overall ad revenue came in at $33.76bn, which was a decrease from $37.934bn for the same period last year.

While the downturn at the end of Q1 was to be expected, Nicole Perrin, eMarketer principal analyst believes that Google’s search business will bounce back in the long term.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google is predicting Q2 to be a tough period for its advertising arm, though following the words of Nicole Perrin, an upturn is expected further down the line as the world economies begin to stabilise.

‘Bad actors’ as Google likes to call people or companies that like to flout rules in the ad space, has seen significant growth in removing 2.7bn ads from its platform in 2019.

It also said that ‘tens of millions’ of malicious COVID-19 related ads had also been removed.

In light of the recent pandemic, Google deployed a dedicated team to improve its enforcement systems to flag misleading ads.

Google also took the step of banning any ads pertaining to masks in March due to a torrent of content that violated policies.

The latest news comes a week after Google said that it will start rolling our a verification program for advertisers to improve transparency and the quality of the ads.