Retention for advertisers declined in Google Pay. What is your analysis plan

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Google is a consumer technology, ads, AI, and cloud company; its products include Search, YouTube, Android, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google Play, Workspace, and Google Cloud.

Google Pay has observed a decline in advertiser retention, meaning fewer advertisers are continuing to use Google Pay’s advertising or promotional surfaces over time. In this RCA interview, you are asked to structure an analysis plan to understand whether the decline is real, where it is concentrated, what may be causing it, and what evidence would be needed before taking action.

Assume advertisers may include businesses using Google Pay to drive offers, rewards, merchant promotions, payment-linked campaigns, or other consumer acquisition and engagement programs. The decline could be tied to advertiser outcomes, campaign setup friction, billing or reporting issues, merchant category shifts, competitive alternatives, policy changes, seasonality, measurement gaps, or changes in consumer usage of Google Pay.

Your task is not to propose a full retention strategy immediately. Focus on how you would diagnose the anomaly in a rigorous, product-minded way, separating data-quality issues from true behavioral changes and identifying the highest-priority areas for deeper investigation.

The experience should consider:

- How “advertiser retention” should be defined, including the retention window, eligible advertiser base, and denominator.

- Whether the decline is broad-based or concentrated by geography, advertiser size, industry, campaign type, acquisition channel, tenure, spend level, or platform integration.

- Instrumentation checks to confirm that advertiser activity, campaign status, spend, renewals, and churn events are being captured correctly.

- Timeline analysis around product launches, pricing or policy changes, reporting changes, payment issues, sales motions, or external market events.

- Hypotheses related to advertiser ROI, campaign performance, onboarding friction, support quality, reporting transparency, and consumer reach.

- Evidence needed from quantitative data, advertiser feedback, sales/support teams, and competitive or market signals.

- Short-term mitigation considerations if the decline appears to affect high-value advertisers or critical markets.

- Prevention mechanisms such as monitoring, alerting, clearer metric ownership, and advertiser health tracking.

The goal is to demonstrate a clear RCA approach: frame the anomaly, validate the metric, segment the problem, generate plausible hypotheses, identify the evidence required, and outline how Google Pay should prioritize investigation and mitigation without jumping prematurely to a solution.