I do agree with the author’s statements about the size of Google’s ego. My experience with their account reps has been largely negative. Despite their high opinions of themselves, half the time they show that they’re astoundingly ignorant about how AdWords and AdSense actually function (I find myself having to educate them). The other half of the time they give you these fuzzy “platitudes” (to use the article’s word) or what might be outright lies about why your account is encountering certain issues. We’ve encountered two likely confidentiality breaches with them (unproven, but highly likely). I know there have been some rather ill-intentioned policies from “above” that have screwed advertisers over on prices under the guise of “improving user experience.” Also, while I am on board with the concept of Google’s “quality score” and using it as an instrument to rank higher quality pages in better positions and using the score to weight the advertiser’s cost per click relative to the bid of whom they are out-ranking, I strongly suspect that Google is also using it to conceal price-setting practices.

Unfortunately, the article is right – where else do we advertisers have to turn? We can’t exactly bite the hand that feeds us. I hope someone else comes along and gives them a run for their money one of these days.

While we might all favor clarity and openness as far as page quality it seems this is not required. I see Google as having been unwise to allow this to have ever existed and certainly see nothing wrong with them having eventually pulled the plug.