Danny Sullivan Marketing Land Presentation at IGNITION

2015-12-11T01:00:00Z

On Wednesday, Marketing Land founding editor Danny Sullivan gave an in-depth presentation at Business Insider's IGNITION conference about what's going on with Google's search business — both what we know and what we don't.

Here's the full presentation he gave discussing his thoughts on the company's cash cow:

Search is the biggest slice of the pie of all online ad spending in the US. It's about 50% of all ad spending, when you take into account mobile and desktop ads.

Digital ad spending is about to overtake TV — largely fueled by search. So, Google's in a great position, right?

"It's a disaster, everything's terrible!"

Not quite.

Lesson:

How do you make sure that you sell more ads? A few ways ...

Google used to allow merchants to list their products in its shopping section for free, but in 2012 it changed its rules. Amazon is one notable retailer that refuses to pay, so it won't show up in Google Shopping.

Sullivan on the move: "This was a huge, huge change for Google. It was a 180-degree reversal on something that they had previously literally called 'evil.' When they went public they said, 'You should never do shopping search and charge people to be in it. That would be an evil thing.' But then they decided, 'This kinda works out really well. We can make a lot of revenue off of that.' So they completely switched it over."