Since June 2022, we have stopped sending conversion signals back to our Google Ads account, and have completely disconnected Analytics and any Google-related tr

Since June 2022, we have stopped sending conversion signals back to our Google Ads account, and have completely disconnected Analytics and any Google-related tracking code from our site. We also started a new Ads property and retired the old, "enriched" one, starting 100% fresh (we were worried about breaking things, so we isolated the move and were ready to rollback quick). We have a yearly Gads budget around ~$5-$6M, of which is 95% SEA. We are selling an unchanged service in a very stable, slowly declining market with heavy ads competition for the top keywords. Roughly 60-65% of our customers are paid and come from Google. Since then, our ROI on that spending has not changed whatsoever. Paid traffic remains stable. Our CAC and conversion rates are virtually the same (even slightly better). Our new customer's LTV has increased compared to the previous cohorts as well, so it seems we're actually getting better quality leads (though I wouldn't attribute it necessarily to Google). So if reporting more data to Google was supposed to help us target our users more cost-efficiently, it did a piss poor job at it. In hindsight, we have wasted so much time trying to help Google make "smarter" decisions by providing it with more and more data (hello server-side tracking), while the most efficient thing to do would likely have been to do nothing at all. We have been working with GAds selling the the same service for more than 8 years now, so we have a large basis of comparison to be able to make that case. Maybe we're lucky, maybe this will turn out badly, but since then I have stopped blindly believing whatever the ads platforms are pretending to do behind the scenes with all this data. If they do anything with it, it doesn't seem to be for the advertiser. Our next step will be to gradually cut our SEA spending and follow the impact. And don't get me starting on Facebook's borderline fraudulent ad performance reporting that doesn't match our reality...