Alphabet Inc.’s Google tallied its highest sales growth in more than a decade and nearly doubled its profit in the third quarter, as smaller businesses poured money into digital ads aimed at customers whose purchases have shifted online.
The strong results underscored how the pandemic has turbocharged the company’s core advertising business. With retail foot traffic dwindling, marketers turned to Google to promote their products, delivering in a single year the kind of quarterly sales growth that the search giant typically records over a two-year span.
