In a lot of spaces, especially those where offline players are just starting to put a lot of weight into online marketing, those near the top clearly don't have

In a lot of spaces, especially those where offline players are just starting to put a lot of weight into online marketing, those near the top clearly don't have positive ROI - at least not on the specific campaign. The mixture of big companies outsourcing to agencies and mom-and-pops being led by google to give this online advertising thing a shot has definitely led to bids being out of hand in many areas. Broad match is simply a genius play by google, although there's certainly a bit of disingenuousness behind a lot of the messaging around the adwords product. It'll be interesting to see what happens with the new "dynamic ads" product, as it's clearly designed to provide less sophisticated advertisers with a simple way to give google their money. They'll build the ads for you! Automatically! How kind of google to provide such a service...