Google Introduces Country-Specific Fees

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Google Country Specific Fees

Last week, Google announced that it is introducing extra charges, also known as country-specific fees, for advertisers in the UK, Turkey and Austria. These charges are effective from the 1st of November 2020.

But why? And what does this mean for advertisers in these countries? We’ve delved into it for you, so read on and learn what these fees could mean for your business or your clients.

How much are the country-specific fees?

Google has said it will introduce the following:

• Ads served in Turkey: a 5% Regulatory Operating Cost added to your invoice or statement
• Ads served in Austria: a 5% Austria Digital Services Tax Fee added to your invoice or statement
• Ads served in the United Kingdom: a 2% UK Digital Services Tax Fee added to your invoice or statement

Why are these being introduced?

In Turkey, the Government have introduced tighter controls around data processing, permission and international data transfers since 2016, similar to the EU’s GDPR ruling. However, since 2016, these regulations have become increasingly difficult to comply with, and as a result, Google has announced it will be opening a Turkish office.

In the UK and Austria, the introduction of the Digital Services Tax means that advertisers will be charged an extra 2% and 5% respectively on their invoices.

The UK’s DST has been in the works for a couple of years and was announced in March. The tax is aimed at collecting revenues from digital companies with at least £500 million in global revenue and £25 million in U.K. revenue, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook. Unfortunately, it is the advertisers who will feel the pinch.

How will the Google country-specific fees affect advertisers?

These additional costs will not affect the CPC advertisers pay or anything related to any bids in the Google Ads auction. The extra charge will be listed on each invoice.

For example, if you are a UK advertiser who spent £1,000 on clicks for the month, your DST fee from Google would be 2% of that, which is £20. That would make your final invoice (exclusive of VAT) £1,020.

What is the best way to handle this moving forward?

Factoring this into your advertising budget will be crucial, so make sure you make the adjustment in time for the November launch. As this is a percentage charge, it is wise to make the estimate based on the upper range of your monthly account spend.

To create or edit a budget, you will need an Admin, Standard, or billing-only access to the paying manager account and the manager account needs to be linked to the payments profile.

Again, all charges will be listed on your monthly invoice, so make sure to check in on your billing documents to ensure the spend is within your allocated budget.

If you are a company based in or partly-based in the above countries and have questions relating to Google’s country-specific fees, feel free to contact us here at WebResults via email or contact form to discuss this further.

Web Analytics Explained

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Web Analytics can be defined as the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimising Web usage. In essence, it is all the information gathered from your website, to be used as a basis for future optimisation. 

Web analytics tracks so many different types of website data and analysing these will help you to make informed decisions on website design and optimization, and ultimately maximises your return on investment (ROI). 

Some of these are:

Page Views: Called ‘hits’ or impressions a lot of the time. This metric will show you the amount of times your site has been viewed within a certain timeframe.

Entry and Exit Page: This will show you what page a visitor landed on and what page they left your site from. It is a good metric to look at as it may help you understand why people are leaving your site.

Bounce Rates: This is the percentage of ‘single-page’ sessions, which refers to the amount of people that visited your site but left without interacting with it.

Locations: This shows where the users are viewing your site from. It can be very useful for marketing and strategic purposes.

Device usage: This shows whether a user is viewing your site on a desktop or mobile device. Again, this can be very useful for marketing purposes, and can also indicate whether your site is mobile friendly, which is critical to modern-day internet businesses and websites.

Organic vs. Paid Sessions: This metric will show you how users got to your site, whether they clicked one of your ads or just simply found you through the Google search. This is important in terms of developing your channels and identifying where you are getting the most return.

Search Queries: This shows what people are words people are searching that bring them to your site, it is very useful when adding keywords or negative keywords. 

Users by gender or age: These metrics are both very useful for marketing as it will help you design your ads appropriately.

 

Web analytics takes out any guessing you may have done in the past and shows you exactly who is visiting your site, what they do when they are there and how they ultimately got there. Keeping track of your web analytic is so important to stay relevant and on top of your respected sector.