Online ad giant Alphabet is set to report Q3 earnings today at 4:30 PM Eastern time. Highlights from the earnings report published earlier today reveal strong growth driven by Search and YouTube.
Key takeaways from Alphabet’s Q3 2023 earnings report include:
- Revenue grew 11% year-over-year to $76.7 billion, topping analyst forecasts.
- Search and YouTube ad sales drive strong growth despite economic uncertainty.
- Google ad revenues rose to nearly $60 billion, up 9% vs last year. Search ads were up 18%. YouTube ad revenue grew 15%.
- Ruth Porat, CFO, cited “meaningful growth in Search and YouTube,” showing ongoing ad spend by marketers.
- Cloud revenue grew 23% year-over-year to $8.4 billion. Traction with retail, healthcare, and financial services customers noted.
- Operating income rose 25% to $21.3 billion, aided by AI-driven product innovations. The margin expanded from 25% to 28%.
Stay tuned as we live blog key earnings insights for digital marketing professionals. Google’s ad machine drives the market – its results matter. Follow along on the live stream.
4:32 PM ET: CEO Sundar Pichai pleased with results as Google turns 25.
4:36 PM ET: Pichai discusses early learnings from Google Bard AI chatbot tests. Users are trying different queries and workflows to improve capabilities. Google is gathering feedback to refine Bard’s conversational AI abilities, particularly for coding workflows. Aiming to make AI interactions more natural.
4:38 PM ET: Pichai notes SGE provides users with more diverse links and sources in results. But ads will still play an important role – not being displaced by AI-generated responses.
4:40 PM ET: Update on YouTube Shorts growth – now seeing 70 billion daily views, up from 50 billion in April. Also, 2 billion signed-in users engaging with Shorts, creating a huge opportunity for ads.
4:43 PM ET: Pichai notes that usage of Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s machine learning platform, grew 7x from Q1 to Q3.
4:45 PM ET: Pichai shares that Pixel has become the fastest-growing smartphone brand in key markets driven by AI, Android, and Google Tensor chip.
4:48 PM ET: Philipp Schindler, SVP & Chief Business Officer at Google, provides updates on Google’s strong advertising performance.
Total ad revenues up 9% year-over-year to nearly $60 billion. Search ad revenue grew 18%, continuing to see robust marketer spend. YouTube ad revenue is up 15%, benefiting from the ongoing growth of Shorts and premium content.
4:51 PM ET: Schindler emphasizes Shorts and connected TV as key long-term YouTube ad growth drivers. He notes YouTube is now the #1 streaming service on connected TVs – 150 million viewers per month in the U.S.
4:53 PM ET: Schindler notes Google News Showcase has now attracted over 200,000 participating news publishers globally since launching earlier this year.
4:55 PM ET: Ruth Porat, CFO, joins the call to discuss advertising growth, noting “meaningful growth in Search and YouTube” demonstrates ongoing ad spend by marketers despite economic uncertainty.
4:59 PM ET: Porat provides an outlook on the ads business, noting “after unprecedented volatility” Google is positive about the year-over-year ad growth in Search and YouTube going forward.
5:01 PM ET: In discussing priorities, Porat emphasizes AI as the most important growth priority, along with moderating headcount growth and optimizing real estate.
5:05 PM ET: In the Q&A, Pichai fields a question about the ROI of AI investments like Bard and SGE.
He sees AI as a foundational platform shift with many opportunities, starting with evolving Search over the next decade. Early feedback on new AI search features is promising.
Future revenue paths may also emerge, like subscriptions for creator-focused AI tools.
5:10 PM ET: When asked how AI could impact the broader advertising industry and Google’s alignment, little concrete insight was provided beyond reiterating the early positive feedback so far.
5:15 PM ET: Answering a question on the SGE rollout, Pichai says Google is still in the early days, but he believes SGE has reached “enough” users to suggest it improves the search experience.
5:21 PM ET: Asked if Google Search activity will remain centered around the search bar, Pichai says he doesn’t foresee that changing. He sees AI as an opportunity to take Google Search to the next level and address use cases it couldn’t previously.
5:23 PM ET: Conference call ends.
Featured Image: IgorGolovniov/Shutterstock
