[Yrlec]

Doesn't surprise me. The value of their ad products is deteriorating rapidly. For instance just today we found that one of our UAC campaigns, which supposedly is super smart and will automatically find the best channel for you decided to switch to a new channel with 14x higher CPC than the other channel that was working very well. That new CPC was 2x our target CPI. Why on earth they don't put in limits to prevent stupid bids like that is beyond me.

[AJ007]

(Going back over a decade) I guessed Google was under-monetizing, and then they could just keep slowly turned the knob, and the indicator was when they couldn't turn that monetization knob any more.

Google's Ad platform is at this point now. It has turned in to this jumble of UI anti-patterns and dark patterns. Each successive rollout of a new feature is basically, add more text we can test and relinquish your bidding control to us. At a slow, incremental pace this works. Eventually, however, they max out either what the advertiser can budget, or remove enough of the advertiser's ROI that it doesn't work any more. Then the risk becomes, rather than failing to grow revenue, that they actually collapse it.

One of the things that stuck with me the most, was many years ago Yahoo would go in and change the text of your search. That was egregious on many levels. The non-self service display ad networks would make you jump through a bunch of hoops to run a campaign and then make it as hard as possible to stop the campaign without it being fraud. Adwords, on the other hand had none of these problems. It worked fantastically. Not anymore.

[martinald]

Agreed, even on boring old paid search the new search suggestions are driving me crazy and I can't see a way to easily turn them off?

It's changed some very niche campaigns from CPC bidding to CPA bidding and performance dropped by about 2/3rds until I noticed and switched back. But it's trying to auto apply CPA bidding again. Losing the will to live fighting the endless BS Google throws at ads now.

[rangerpolitic]

Isn't great that exact match doesn't mean exact match? Or, isn't it great that your ads and landing pages routinely outperform the supposed Quality Score? Isn't it great that...