[discmonkey]

They do have this, you can choose to bid for a target conversion cost (I want to pay at most $x per conversion). In general I find all of this pretty silly as a Google employee.. I don't think you can distill the complexity of any change down to one article. Say for example that Google did just raise how much advertisers paid per click across the board, why would that lead to billions of dollars in profit? I would bet that the majority of advertisers on Google already spend their whole budget, so that would mean that now they would just be getting less clicks and conversions per dollar of budget spend. Logically they would then move some of this budget to other advertising channels such as Facebook. Charging more per impression always has second order effects, but who cares about that on hackernews

[londons_explore]

Of course - pricing is a maximization game.

But thats why modelling businesses has such a large opportunity. Some businesses will be prepared to pay more if you send them more conversions... Others have a fixed budget. Some use many platforms, and certain things might persuade them to move more budget to you. Some might be persuaded by "tricks" like handing out airmiles, vouchers or free stuff to the marketing team in return for ad spend.

All of those things require a higher level strategy than just doing everything per-impression.