BY SETH FIEGERMAN

From the perspective of many consumers, Google may look like a business firing on all cylinders: Android phones are everywhere, its futuristic projects featuring Internet-beaming balloons and artificial intelligence grab headlines and “Google” remains synonymous with online search.

To investors on Wall Street, however, Google is facing a long losing streak.

Google has missed analyst estimates for profits for six consecutive quarters. Revenue growth has been hampered by currency issues, said to be hitting many global businesses, and more specifically from a long and rocky shift to making as much money from advertising on smaller screens as it once did on desktop.

Investors have cooled on the company. Google stock has effectively been flat for the past year.

On Thursday, however, Google is expected to begin making amends with Wall Street during its second quarters earning call by enlisting the help of someone who speaks their language.

Ruth Porat, the former Morgan Stanley executive who recently took over as Google’s chief financial officer, will make her public debut on the quarterly earnings call with analysts. Porat, once dubbed the most powerful woman on Wall Street and known for reining in costs at Morgan Stanley, is expected to renew investor confidence that Google can do the same.

“She has an opportunity tomorrow to set the tone for her tenure there,” says John Blackledge, an analyst with Cowen & Co. “I would expect her to be balanced, but balanced towards cost discipline.”

GOOG Chart GOOG data by YCharts

Behind the scenes, Porat is already said to be working on this. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Porat is involved with an audit of Google’s “costs, revenue and accounting systems.” The pace of hiring, a key expense area of focus, declined in the first quarter (though Google continues to support more than 55,000 employees).

“Investors will look kindly on that,” Blackledge says.

That doesn’t mean Google will stop pursuing the big bets, often called moonshots, that have come to define the company.

In his post announcing the hiring of Porat, Google CEO and cofounder Larry Page said she would help Google “invest in a thoughtful, disciplined way in our next generation of big bets.” As Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC, told Mashable at the time, that means Porat will “see the winners, starve the losers.”

Cutting costs and boosting profits isn’t enough to revive the full faith of investors. Google must also defuse concerns about its potential to make money from ads, still its core business, on smartphones and tablets.

Google is expected to post profits of $6.99 per share on revenue of $18.5 billion for the June quarter, according to the conensus estimate among analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

During the quarter, Google changed its algorithm to downgrade less mobile-friendly websites in search results. The move, commonly referred to as Mobilegeddon, may have already begun paying dividends for Google. One Adobe study found marketers spending more to compensate for lost organic traffic.

This week, Google confirmed it has begun testing a long-rumored options to purchase products on the search results page on smartphone, potentially bringing in a new stream of revenue from retailers and go a long way toward easing concerns about the strength of its business on these devices.

IMAGE: Ruth Porat, Google’s new CFO and a former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Morgan Stanley, in a panel during the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, April 28, 2014 in Beverly Hills, California.

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