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by toast0 246 days ago
There are certainly competition concerns about Google's advertising programs.

But within their advertising market, you compete for placement with other advertisers. If everyone is getting lots of fraud traffic, presumably they adjust their bids for it, if you're getting outbid consistently, it's reasonable to expect that the other advertisers are either getting a better ROI or they have a lower ROI target than you do.

About a million years ago, I was on a team that had a significant ad program, and it was primarily data driven, we'd come up with keywords to advertise on, measure the results and adjust our bids. With a little bit of manual work to filter out inappropriate keywords or to allow a lower ROI on "important" keywords. Of course, our revenue was largely also from advertising, so it was a bit circular.