If Google were the U.S. government, the data that streams into Nicholas Fox’s laptop every day would be classified as top secret.
Fox is among a small group of Google employees who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet. The number of searches and clicks, the rate at which users click on ads, the revenue all this generates — everything is tracked hour by hour, then compared with the data from a week earlier, then charted.
“You can see very, very quickly if anything is amiss,” said Fox, the director of business product management at Google.
Fox and his “ads quality” team can also quickly see whether something is working particularly well. His group’s mission, to constantly fine-tune Google’s ad delivery system, has one overriding objective: show users only the ads they are most likely to be interested in and click on.
Google runs a complex auction-based system that determines which ads will appear where, and in what order. Every time the team alters the formulas that select and rank ads, Fox can run a test and quickly see the effect of the changes on users, advertisers and Google’s revenue — which, in this year’s first quarter, came in at the rate of more than $2 million an hour.
The job has given Fox, a soft-spoken 29-year-old with an obvious affinity for nuance and numbers, a detailed understanding of the complex dynamics at work inside Google’s ad-driven economic engine.
Fox, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics and spent two years at McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, before joining Google in 2003, also helped organize its “Revenue Force.” This select group of company engineers, sales and finance people, product managers and statisticians is charged with keeping top executives apprised…