The Google Ads "Conspiracy"

 My employer is one of millions across the world to run Google Ads. When I was new at the company, the first thing I was told was that I should never click on the company’s Google Ads, because Google charges per click, and the rate per click is an extortionate £1. Like any young, devious mastermind armed with seemingly innocent but twistable information - I began to consider, “does anyone I don’t like run Google Ads?” And so began my descent into madness.

The scheme was simple: find a Conservative Party Google Ad, either as a link that shows when a key term is Googled or an advertisement embedded in another website. Then, and here’s the genius part, click on it. Click on it several times, hundreds even, for hours on end, until either my mind or my fingers gave out, potentially aided by lethal doses of soft drinks to sustain the incredible clicking speed. I estimated that I would genuinely be able to click around 100,000 times in a 16-hour waking day, costing the Conservative Party around £200,000 for just a single weekend of rather intensive work. Doing this for multiple weekends consecutively, as well as recruiting others to take part, would see the Conservative Party facing bankruptcy before the end of next year, without even doing anything illegal!

Two problems emerged.

No, neither problem was that I have a life, because I do not.

Firstly, my employer had substantially simplified the way in which charging for Google Ads works. Information about this came from an unlikely source - Fesshole. Fesshole is a Twitter account in which people anonymously share confessions, from the funny to the bizarre to the downright heinous. If I had confessed something to Fesshole, I would be concerned in the extreme about the government’s plans to remove online anonymity (I would also be concerned in the extreme about it if I was, for instance, an anonymous political essayist). But that is not the point. The point is that someone posted to Fesshole “I frequently Google companies I hate and click on their ads, just to cost them a couple of quid. If enough of us do it, it will fuck their marketing "funnel" as well, so that they can't even figure out what to spend their money on. JOIN ME.” Upon first reading this I was annoyed that my master plan appeared to have been foiled by this publishing before R was due to publish. But, upon further investigation, happening upon this tweet has saved me an awful lot of weekends clicking. It turns out, that while Google does charge around £1 per click, users set budgets for advertisements in advance, and an advertisement is withdrawn once it has reached its budget (if not withdrawn earlier by the person who put up the advert in the first place). So, the most you can hope to achieve is a premature retraction of the advert, and a very confused marketing statistician - neither of which are likely to cost the advertiser too much money. This brings me neatly to the second problem.

We can know for sure that not running Google Ads does not cost the Conservatives too much money because they are not currently running any Google Ads. This appears to currently be a conscious choice, as the Conservative Party was running a Google Ad up to 4th February 2020 that linked to their merchandise shop. However, the Conservatives did come close to being banned as an advertiser by Google entirely. And here is the sinister turn.

Eight Conservative Party adverts that were placed during the 2019 election campaign were banned for misinformation. Six of these linked to the website labourmanifesto.org.uk, a website set up by the Conservative Party that contained false information about the Labour Party manifesto, which had been launched on the same day as the fake website and adverts. Several adverts linking to the fake website were not caught by Google, and several adverts claiming to link to Labour’s policies that actually linked to the official Conservative Party website were also allowed to continue to stand for the duration of the election campaign. Google also pulled a Conservative Party advert in November 2019, though when approached for comment claimed that this had been “in error”, even though the advert was never restored.

Naturally, this story that started with a humorous idea about a right-wing party, has ended where every story about right-wing parties ends up: disinformation. I wonder if the Conservatives have stopped lying yet, or if they are continuing to lie about a certain Christmas party…