| I'll start by pointing out that this article makes no sense whatsoever for large businesses and agency-managed campaigns, where expertise and scale mean CPC and CPM are analytical tools and not goals. When you have enough expertise to integrate data and attribute results, it makes no sense to optimize for anything other than ROI/CPA. Now. Both Google and Facebook get a lot of revenue from small and medium businesses. SMBs often have short budgets, little expertise and limited work-hours to dedicate to online advertising, so it's not at all uncommon for them to concentrate all or most of their effort into a single platform. For that reason, both Google and Facebook have a constant incentive to constantly innovate in formats, targeting options and channels catered to long-tail small pockets. The problem with this article is that it mixes large and small. The over-crowded web display network caters mostly to big fish (common-enough exception: small fish by proxy, through retailer campaigns). Am I saying SMBs running web display campaigns is unheard of? Not at all, but clearly that's not Google's strongest proposition. For SMBs, that would be Search. App display and exclusive channels (such as Gmail's promotions inbox) being the next logical step. Now I work at a fairly specialized agency so I can only guess what my online advertising portfolio would look like if I were an SMB or a boutique agency with off-the-shelf solutions for SMBs, but I honestly don't see Google being ruled out or even majorly threatened for most use cases by this inflation in the web display network. Large companies and agencies will keep otimizing display campaigns for ROI/CPA. Small businesses (and their agencies) will flock around either Facebook or Google Search mostly, as they already do. |