Why I No Longer Trust Google

I want to get something off my chest.? My company is one of the original Google Premier Partners, and I've worked in the Google ecosystem for over a decade.

It used to be that if someone came to me and said that they needed help with Google, I was excited, and I would immediately start planning a campaign, and I would barely question whether or not Google Ads was a good idea for them.

Now, that isn't the case. If someone asks me for help with Google Ads, my first instinct is: are there any alternatives? Should we run ads on the Gartner properties, or G2, or Bing Ads, or LinkedIn and Facebook Ads. Or can we produce better results focusing on content marketing? There are still plenty of times where Google Ads makes sense for a client, but it is NO longer my default ad platform, and here is why:?

Google is being sued by the Department of Justice, and the lawsuit has made public some unsavory business practices that I think are driving the ROI of Google Ads downward.?

Here's what I'm talking about:?

1. Randomization. This is Google's policy of randomly removing position #1 for a keyword advertiser as long as the ad rank is "close enough" to the second highest bidder, which results in advertisers bidding on average 3x more in order to reclaim the top position and cancel out the randomization effect. So the end result is: some advertisers pay more for the same results. Google claims that this is in order to prevent people from simply BUYING the top spot even if a more relevant ad could perform better in that position, and randomly changing things allows lower paying advertisers to break in. That sounds good in theory, but in practice, it simply results in Google making more money from advertisers.?
2. Format Pricing (Project Momiji). This is where Google artificially boosts the bid made by the second place bidder, which leads to a 15% price increase for the winning advertiser. I don’t want to attempt to justify this on Google’s behalf, but you can read about it in the DOJ’s slide deck here.?
3. Exact match keywords. This is somewhat older news, but exact match keywords do not come close to matching the exact phrases people are searching for. This is highly misleading, because the name "exact match" implies that the keyword will match the search phrase, and I've seen this get worse over time.?
4. Obscuring keyword results. Again, this one isn't a new issue, but it's gotten worse over time. This is where Google essentially hides at least 20% of keyword results, which means that we cannot effectively use negative keywords to prevent ads from running on irrelevant searches. There is no way to justify this in my opinion, but it of course results in potentially 20% of wasted traffic.?

Based on the points above, I am now always looking for alternatives to Google. The exception to that is of course when results are so spectacular that there is no alternative. And there are still accounts that drive tons of conversion results every week from Google campaigns, and the cost per conversion is super low. As long as that is the case, we are essentially stuck with Google. But the problem with that is: all these tactics have appeared to get worse as Google's growth has slowed. In other words, Google is operating in the mode of squeezing cash out of advertisers as best it can in order to meet Wall Street's expectations. And I don't feel safe even with accounts that are crushing it, and so even for these, we need to maximize the alternatives to Google.?

I'm not alone in feeling this way. Here's an article that highlights how other advertisers feel about the Google "Trust" issue.